‘Apophanies’
Gabbi Grill + Orli Swergold

June 21 - July 14, 2024

Apophenia: the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas).

Moments of apophenia regularly occur to us as we attempt to understand a senseless world: seeing a dog in a cloud, hearing random sounds and feeling as if your name was called, utilizing astrology to characterize others. This phenomenon helps us weave stories about our surroundings and make meaningful connections between seemingly disparate things. We see relationships that were never really there, creating the illusion of a false sense of order within chaos. Gabbi Grill and Orli Swergld reveal our world’s connectivity by constructing an invented sense of order and logic within their art objects. Both artists exploit the human tendency to seek patterns and utilize abstraction to create artworks that lead viewers to manifold impressions and conclusions. Like a Rorschach test, the associations one can draw from their artworks are limitless.

Gabbi Grill’s paintings are the product of her obsessive mark making practice. For this series of works, she first established an underlying matrix sourced from disposable packaging materials and moving palettes. She then used this scaffolding as a guide, applying small dots and strands of paint to create a field of imagery. The resulting shag rug-like paintings create a sense of distortion, disorientation, and disquiet.

Orli Swergold’s sculptural paintings combine paper pulp with metal. She webs pulp within holes in steel and copper sheets, often using colors to create concentric patterns like the inside of a geode. To achieve the work’s pumice-like surfaces, she makes impressions in the pulp while it’s still wet. She abstracts the Hebrew letters of her name to create compositions for her works and, resultantly, they often suggest a kind of ancient pseudo script. Perhaps they are the residue of an ancient alien superorganism attempting to communicate through the annals of time.

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