Catinca Tabacaru Gallery Collective

a DEFECT // to DEFECT

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels

8 December 2016  —  15 January 2017

Installation View
Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
a DEFECT // to DEFECT, 2016
New York, NY

Installation View
Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
a DEFECT // to DEFECT, 2016
New York, NY

Installation View
Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
a DEFECT // to DEFECT, 2016
New York, NY

Installation View
Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
a DEFECT // to DEFECT, 2016
New York, NY

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
Emergent and Refulgent , 2016
cedar, safety netting and plaster
approx 83 × 58 × 7 inches

Detail
Emergent and Refulgent, 2016

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Extrusion 5, 2016
Safety netting, plaster
19 × 8 × 14 in

Detail
Extrusion 5, 2016

Detail
Extrusion 5, 2016

Detail
Extrusion 5, 2016

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
Efflorescent 4, 2016
urethane foam
14 × 16 × 2 in

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
Efflorescent, 2016
urethane foam
75 × 56 × 4 in

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels
Template (of Template), 2016
pine
8 × 6.5 × 7 in

New York, December 8, 2016: “How do we learn to change for a future we can’t imagine?” asks the Tennessee-born sculptor as she prepares for her first New York solo show at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, opening December 8, 2016. An avid reader of magical realism, Bothwell Fels makes works that sits somewhere between folklore and sci-fi, an exploration of the here-now, never was, and maybe-could-be.

Fascinated with ruptures and growths, Bothwell Fels approaches sites-of-change both in body and land. Where dissected illustrations of erupting volcanoes and lactating breasts look very similar, by her hands the wood and plaster morphs into a new expression of such swellings. She turns to raw, physical materials to consider geological shifts in tangent with the places we make inside ourselves for growth.

Originally trained as a social psychologist, Bothwell Fels explores how environments can shift perceptions of being. She often works with mundane expectations of surrounding environments and subverts them into the unexpected and out-of-ordinary. Where are there seams between the real and the un-real? How does one become the other? Her architecture of effect​ and becoming explores the potential of curiosity as radical action in a time of disillusionment.