Exploring the room as a vessel for memory and inherited history, Near Poets invites each artist to situate a painting within a historical room of their choosing. Given minimal parameters, the selected rooms vary widely, with no shared time period, historical figure, movement, architectural style, or decorative language connecting them.
This imaginative act finds resonance in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (1958), in which he considers how the psychological experience of physical surroundings such as houses and rooms shapes our thoughts, memories, and desires. For Bachelard, when one experiences a poetic image of space, it "reverberates" or takes root in us, making us "poets" in the phenomenological sense. Such images awaken a state of reverie in the viewer, and in turn we become a "poet"—not an author, one who consciously inhabits the imagination. It is from this idea that the exhibition takes its title.
What began as a meditation on the value of blue, inspired by her eldest child's affinity for the color, led Kira Maria Shewfelt (b. 1984) to the transcendent, luminous ultramarine of Giotto's frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel. Shewfelt describes Giotto's blue as activating what she calls a "sense of the unseen," drawing her into a realm beyond linear time. Echoing the ethereal imagery of the frescoes, A prayer to the night sky for bravery is filled with fanciful lions, flowers and stars inspired by the enigmatic skies shared across the ages. In another celestial study of blue, Sophie Lourdes Knight’s (b. 1992) The Glass Rabbit rests in The Octagon Room in the Royal Observatory, London, alongside scientific instruments that, like the figurine, point upward toward the sky and the worlds beyond.
Originally built in 1933, the Antwerp Sportpaleis arena housed the largest indoor wooden velodrome in Europe, hosting six-day cycling races and track events, while spectators gathered in the central restaurant and hospitality area. Arthur Wechsler (b. 2000) reimagines the iconic "cyclists' crouch" of Art Deco advertisements in Eddy, placing it within the arena celebrating the mechanics and endurance of the sport. The leisurely reader in Quintessa Matranga’s (b. 1989) Abacus resides in the Corinthian Yacht Club in Tiburon, the second-oldest yacht club in Northern California founded in 1886. Named after the sailing term "Corinthian," referring to amateur sportsmanship, the club was founded in direct response to the elitist domination of sailing in the Bay, with the aim of making the sport accessible to amateurs and enthusiasts alike.
Within FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., stands Theodore Kaczynski's one-room cabin (aka the Unabomber). Before its arrival there, it was dismantled, transported, and reconstructed inside a vast industrial warehouse in Sacramento, where it remained for over a decade, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a typical gallery space with its stark white walls and overhead lighting. In Scram, Aaron Elvis Jupin (b. 1991) places the iconic Sesame Street character alongside the cabin, drawing an unexpected parallel between two hermetic figures whose forms of isolation echo one another. Similarly engaged with the display and preservation of cultural artifacts, Will Yackulic’s (b. 1975) still life Antiquities (At The Met II) rests within the Greek and Roman atrium at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (The Leon Levy and Shelby White Court). A focal point of the museum’s classical wing, the atrium resembles an ancient Roman villa with a skylit peristyle to illuminate the various marble figures, reliefs, and sarcophagi.
In keeping with the tradition of painting as historical record, Painting for the Estate (Henry ‘Hank’ S. McNeil, Jr.) by Brian Rideout (b. 1986) takes its imagery from the Christie’s promotional material for their 20th/21st-century sale, featuring renowned minimal artworks from the collection of Henry ‘Hank’ S. McNeil, Jr. Set within a handmade frame referencing the minimalist collection, the painting will hang in the same home as the collection itself, an ode and a record of the collection that no longer is.
Though these paintings span disparate places, they are united by an act of fictional placement. Imagined rather than realized, they carry a subtle note of fantasy because they will never exist in their intended spaces. Existing only in the mind's eye, these encounters invite viewers to inhabit spaces they could never otherwise experience and to reconsider those they already know. By way of fantasy, the artist can play with widening or loosening the institutional conditions surrounding making, display, circulation, and ownership. Leading with imagination and the phenomena of reverie, we are offered a momentary untethering from prescribed ways of production, reception and consumption of artworks within our contemporary matrix, whose structures are made to seem inevitable.