Whether the world Hsu and Karlson put forth in “Finders’ Lodge” exists in the past, the future, or only in their imaginations, they are clearly escaping to it together. Hovering above the hay, the text piece spoke to a pastoral, prelapsarian idyll, an innocent girlhood now gone.
On one wall, she reproduced a text she had written as a child, in which she listed the animal sounds she loved hearing on her family’s farm. Hsu’s drawings, meanwhile, were fanciful doodles and dashings-off of words and phrases in the aforementioned green ink: food, love, baby, her own name. Her ceramic works, which included a heart and a star made out of ropes of clay and embellished with flora and smiling faces, could decorate a child’s bedroom. In her colored-pencil drawings, molten, cartoonish characters frolicking through verdant forest scenes in platform shoes and jewel-toned eyeshadow suggest fairy-tale figures from the Y2K era. Karlson, in particular, proved to be a master of make-believe. The artists seemed to fixate on the greener pastures of childhood, a period in which playfulness is permitted and fantasies can run free.
The show’s patent unseriousness often manifested as girlish whimsy. It was a feast of objects, a messy monument to the artists’ shared meals. They brought dozens of peculiar paintings, drawings, and ceramic sculptures to LA for the show, and arranged most of them haphazardly on a long table in the gallery. (When Hsu and Karlson met, they bonded over their love of the author.) “Please bring strange things / Please come bringing new things,” the ballad begins, and Hsu and Karlson abided. On one of the gallery walls, Hsu wrote, in spiraling letters, the lyrics to “Initiation Song from the Finders’ Lodge,” a folkish ballad sung by a nomadic tribe in science-fiction writer Ursula K. The gallery floor was strewn with hay, with a few bales stacked in a corner for seating. Together, the works formed a pair of unusually wondrous exquisite corpses. Two wall-mounted paintings served as a nod to a more conventional gallery presentation, and carried out a clever tête-à-tête: in one, a small canvas that Hsu adorned with grassy-green ink nested inside a larger one that Karlson painted in her signature psychedelic flora the other reversed the configuration. She has had solo exhibitions at Ashley, Berlin (2021) in lieu, Los Angeles (2020) and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2017).
#Maren karlson series#
“Finders’ Lodge” embraced a slapped-together spirit, and in its most charming moments, operated like a series of notes passed between friends, dense as it was with a private language. 1988, Rostock, Germany) lives and works in Berlin.
#Maren karlson free#
The artists seemed to rejoice at an opportunity to break free from the heavier stakes of their burgeoning, more formal art careers-to pursue something more lighthearted.
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