TATIANA KRONBERG

Exposure
April 28 – May 21, 2017
Opening Reception: April 28, 7-9 PM

Performance: April 21, 7-9pm
Performers: Tatiana Kronberg / Emo Johnson
Music Score: Robert Johnston / Forrest Gillespie
Text: Rosie Motley

Essex Flowers is pleased to announce Exposure, an exhibition of new works by Tatiana Kronberg. The show will feature photograms produced on-site and exhibited alongside the leftover debris from the precursory performance out of which they germinated. Exercise rings hang from the ceiling; on the wall and suspended from clear cords hang objects of varying translucency and density. Among the objects are assorted rubber orbs, cast silicon appendages that resemble body and machine parts, gel-filled rubber tubing, chemistry beakers and vases with long slender necks. The residual setting is both futuristic and folkloric, existing within multiple imagined temporal possibilities and suggestive of an abandoned experiment gone wrong.

Black painted walls and vinyled windows: the space functions as both camera and darkroom, negotiating shadow and light. The room is pulsing with a palpable fertility, darkness providing the opportunity for transformation and transcendence. Low wattage red, green and blue bulbs reveal the shadows of two bodies, music dictating their movement. They peel off layers of diaphanous skin, shiny with antiseptic, and their raw bodies vibrate with a deeply feral yearning.

Longing is a specific type of suffering, experienced with visceral urgency and laced with a latent eroticism, the agony of desire for what once was seduces its victim with an all-consuming pain. There is a viscosity to longing - you can feel it coagulating in your veins, aware of its thickening with time or reflection. If you lose an arm or a leg, you are likely to experience phantom sensations, an aching perception of the missing limb's presence, almost always characterized by pain. The agony of longing and desire is unfailingly physical, but we often struggle to speak of these feelings in biochemical terms. Neurons along the brain-gut axis are stimulated and we imagine butterflies in our stomach.

The room is now empty with no one present to explain the events prior, just leftover clues that verify their existence, like traces of DNA left behind on the lick of an envelope or information sent down to earth from a dead star. The evidence alludes to an incident gone awry. Bodies and objects are equalized as images on paper, flattened into shadows through exposure to light, preserved in a continuous loop with no beginning or end.