Three Notes of Destabilization

What occurs when three artistic voices, varying in native tongues and creative mediums, come together to articulate scenes of irregularity? A piercing language is created, one that speaks to the human relationship to reality––its malleability, its unpredictability, and its often surreal physicality. This month in New York City, a group show by Amity explores such a convergence.

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There’s Ukrainian-born, Paris-based painter Timur Postovyi, who places abstract, human-like figures in settings both familiar and dreamlike, creating scenes that are strikingly Kafkaesque. Michael Dean, a British sculptor and installation artist, who uses materials like steel and concrete to construct abstract, semiotic configurations that question the human approach to typography and the physical manifestations of language. And finally, Paris-born, New York-based Camille Henrot, whose practice is a diverse investigation of the human condition that ranges from disquieting paintings of mothers and their children, to an installation of objects sourced from eBay, to numerous experimental films which use the interaction of sound and image to explore areas of history, memory, and epistemology. 

In “Great and sudden change: Timur Postovyi, Michael Dean & Camille Henrot,” destabilization is the thread between each artist’s work: a repurposing of familiar moments, images, and histories through scenes of disfiguration and reflection. Postovyi’s painting, can I?, 2024, depicts two white figures standing on either side of a door. In a blue room structured by illusive white lines, the expressions of the two denote a visceral feeling of unease. Across the room, in Dean’s floor sculpture sake (working title), 2017, a balled-up gray fist protrudes from a base of gray concrete shapes, as red tape at the base of the hand reads, “Fucks,” in black typeface. Meanwhile, recordings of Henrot’s film Psychopompe, 2011, on view for the first time since her survey at the New Museum in 2014, plays alongside two of her rarely screened films from 2005 and 2013. In Psychopompe, a Frankenstein-character study fuses scientific records, climbing videos, and B-movies. Live music will be played alongside the film on two occasions during the exhibition in late October. Take in the exhibition as a whole, and a pervasive insight into the abnormality of everyday existence comes into view, where the aberrations of modern life are intimate and entwined.

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“Great and sudden change: Timur Postovyi, Michael Dean & Camille Henrot” is on view through November 1 2024 at 173 Canal St., New York, NY 10013.

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