State VIII Project (2024-2027) is pleased to announce Preface / … yet flavourful. This exhibition, which is the second in the Hyde Park location, pairs paintings and works on paper by Dasha Shishkin and Braden Bandel, who ground their practices in assembling scenes and sceneries, respectively. Rather than locating their shared strategy to materialize the surface and aestheticize the intent, this presentation aims to map a Venn diagram with contrasting elements such as beauty, agitation, reality, imagination, humility, and pride.

Dasha Shishkin employs a quasi-painterly approach to create drawings and prints. Her process, which often constitutes layers of underdrawings, reveals itself as different marks commingle and entangle. This moment of “coming together,” formally recalling sinopias and conceptually appearing unfinished, exhibits the artist’s indisputable wit to include, stage, juxtapose, and contradict with little concern beyond an artificial form of symbiosis. In other words, a sense of oddity undergirds her expression of sensation and anti-consciousness, highlighting Shishkin’s arrangement of paradoxical yet credible scenes, which are in themselves incomplete without figures and perspectival surroundings. (They simultaneously constrain and liberate each other, like salt and pepper?) Additionally, sets of idiosyncrasy inform the context in which her work resides and thrives. Works on paper typically have whimsical titles, if not none. Canvases undergo folding before installing, which complicates the experience of viewing and pondering. But they all celebrate nuanced casualness, productively misaligning the center of foci with unexpected discovery.

Braden Bandel, on the other hand, prizes the manufacture and evocation of scenery in his paintings. Forms such as clouds, trees, waves, and ruins frequent his canvas, and Bandel intentionally isolates them as if they are ready for cataloging. Such a zoomed-in and arguably scientific lens levitates the scrutinized subject and invites mystery as well as uncertainty to erupt. Through color studies, integral steps during painting preparation, Bandel romanticizes the picture and seduces the spectator, posing to nudge if not overcome the jadedness toward landscape painting. In effect, one may feel both embraced and repelled when confronting the illusion Bandel lubricates and trusts. Curiously, the artist resists the idea of portraiture, suggesting that he is not interested in anthropomorphizing nature. That Bandel purposefully adds favour to the narrative beyond his paintings reserves the space for an internal Q&A: How do we receive beauty and does the delivery of beauty, at least occasionally, accompany an alarming lack of awareness?

Preface / … yet flavourful is on view from September 21 to October 27, 2024. The closing reception will coincide with Open House Chicago 2024 on October 20 and 21. For reproduction requests, interviews with the artists, and general inquiries, please contact TPQ at +1-646-320-5932 or phtrchc@gmail.com. Special thanks to the lenders of this exhibition, including the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut, three anonymous collectors, and the artists.

Hours by appointment at phtrchc@gmail.com