Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new and recent multidisciplinary works by Canadian artist duo Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens. Marking the second solo exhibition with the gallery, ceramic sculptures from their ongoing series Alternative Facts of the 21st Century, stylized data visualizations from the series, What We Know for Sure, and their recent video What Birds Talk About When They Talk, will be on view. The bodies of work serve as an extension of Ibghy & Lemmens’ collaborative practice and their playful yet intense exploration of how we know what we know and what we think we know when we claim to know something. The exhibition will be on view from October 27 to December 17, 2022.
Alternative Facts of the 21st Century, is a series of colorful, hand modeled ceramic works that give shape to questionable facts, rumors, and conspiracies that have spread locally, nationally, and globally since the beginning of the current century. Displayed in solid, bright, matte colors, and bolstered by simple, yet refined wooden plinths, the para-monuments are accompanied by their respective backstories that detail the “false” truths which the sculptures are meant to commemorate. What could look like a charred memorial- The Edison (2022), is a blackened ceramic ATM machine inspired by the defunct device which Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the biotech company Theranos, had proselytized to the masses (and shareholders) as a machine capable of scanning for hundreds of maladies with a single drop of an individual’s blood. The founder was able to successfully secure a $9 billion evaluation for a company that never produced a viable machine. Lance Armstrong’s Seven Tour de France Wins (2022) gestures to Duchamp’s canonical Bicycle Wheel, while also directing attention to the once-famed American cyclist’s seven consecutive wins, which were eventually stripped from the athlete after a doping scandal was revealed.
Alongside the ceramic para-monuments, the exhibition will include paper collage works from the series What We Know for Sure (2017-current). Consisting of brightly colored charts, graphs, and abstracted visualizations, which may appear as haphazard or arbitrary, the carefully hand-cut shapes are the result of the artists meticulously culling information found in academic journals, essays, and conference proceedings. Standard bar graphs playfully quantify a weather cycle in Number of Rainy Days in Paris (2022), while organic shapes of layered greens visualize the overlapping territories of two species of wren. Created with modest means, the work examines the aesthetics of abstract representation and questions what is considered a true mode of knowledge in contemporary Western societies.
Continuing in the downstairs project gallery, the artists’ recent video, What Birds Talk About When They Talk (2019-2021), will be on view. Through a cross-cultural collection of references from mythology, science, cartoons, and literature, the video animation humorously ventures into the stakes of interpretation. Propelled by a soundtrack of calling, drumming, tweeting, rattling, duetting, screaming, mocking, conversing, news reporting, philosophizing, and prophesying birds, the work invites us to consider the effects of our interpretative acts: Do they foster connections across difference or limit our understanding of what nonhuman animals can think and do? The translations presented in the piece reflect the continuity or discontinuity humans imagine between themselves and birds, from objects to talk about to subjects that can be talked with.
