Exhibition: Soft As Velvet Eyes Can See

Bureau is pleased to present Soft As Velvet Eyes Can See, a three-person show featuring Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, K.R.M. Mooney and Kate Spencer Stewart. The exhibition emphasizes the somatic experience of perception, allowing for the works to be read intuitively and sensorily. The title for the show, Soft As Velvet Eyes Can See is a lyric from the band My Bloody Valentine and suggests a kind of synesthetic transfer, offering the possibility of experiencing the tactile through sight. My Bloody Valentine are known for a highly textured wall of guitar noise, where technique is pushed to a sonic limit, to create an immersive and encompassing soundscape. The exhibition seeks to create a similar lush bombardment.

Each artist is acutely sensitive to the materiality of their own practice. Their works, however physically grounded, are beguiling, engrossing and enigmatic. Alexi-Meskhishvili’s photographic images – framed or billowing on floor- length, translucent cotton textile – approach abstraction despite the concrete nature of the medium. A distant and veiled subject is obscured in an enveloping gauzy light, eschewing focus. Influenced by a background in jewelry and small metals, Mooney’s sculptures have a solid, machine-like physicality, yet refuse a specific function. The works are positioned intentionally within the gallery’s architecture, placed directly atop the sun-lit floor or hung at hip-height of an interstitial space. Mooney’s object-amalgams manifest a steely, metallic quality that is met with a luminescent softness, as disparate surface textures catch the fluctuating qualities of light. Stewart’s oil paintings open up vast expanses of color and space that are as abundantly aqueous and atmospheric as they are glowing and igneous. The surfaces are built up with densely layered pigments that forge a shimmering vision that morphs at angles and seems to buzz with an ecstatic haze of noise.

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili (b.1979 Tbilisi, Georgia) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She received a BFA from Bard College, New York. Solo exhibitions include Boiled Language, LC Queisser, Tbilisi, 2020; mother, feelings, cognac, galerie frank elbaz, Paris, 2019; Hollow Body, Andrea Rosen Gallery 2, New York, 2016; I Move Forward, I Protozoan, Pure Protein, Micky Schubert, Berlin, 2016; Hollow Body, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2015. Selected recent group exhibitions include, Studio Berlin, Berghain/Boros Collection, Berlin, 2020; Albrecht Fuchs: Album. Portraits 1989-2020, Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, 2020; Auguries Cast Aside, Karma, NY, 2019; Outlandish and Emblematic, the Still Life in Photographic Concepts of the Present, Kunst Haus, Vienna, 2018; Made in Germany III, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, 2017; and Surround Audience, New Museum Triennial, New York, 2015. She will be included in the Louis Roederer Discovery Award exhibition in Arles, France this summer, 2021.

K.R.M. Mooney (b. 1990 Seattle, WA) lives and works in Oakland, CA. Mooney received a BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco and a BA with Honors from Central Saint Martins, London. Solo exhibitions include Ores, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 2019; Näcre, Altman Siegel, San Francisco, 2019; Carrier, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, 2019; SECA Art Award exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2019; Oscine, Reserve Ames, Los Angeles, 2016; Near Passerine, Pied-à-terre, Ottsville, PA, 2015; En, Set, The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco, 2015. Selected recent group exhibitions include, The Inconstant World, ICA LA, Los Angeles, 2021; Sometimes when birds make sounds, it feels like the sounds are coming out of me, Yale Union, Portland, Oregon, 2020; In Practice: Total Disbelief, Sculpture Center, Queens, NY, 2020. Mooney will have a solo exhibition at Progetto, Lecce, Italy in 2022.

Kate Spencer Stewart (b. 1984 Phoenix, AZ) Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and attended the Mountain School of the Arts, Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Park View/Paul Soto, Los Angeles, 2020; The Gallery @ Le Hangar Restaurant, Paris, 2019; The Gallery @ Michael’s Restaurant, Santa Monica, 2018. Selected recent group exhibitions include, Friend of a Friend, Piktogram Gallery, Warsaw, 2019; Here’s why patterns, Here’s why patterns, Here’s why patterns, Misako & Rosen Gallery, Tokyo, 2019; CD SM KSS, Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2017. She will have a solo exhibition at La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels in 2022.