The Agenda: Nike Schroeder and The Listening Garden at Show + Tell Projects
Author:Abigail Stone
Show + Tell Projects, a fusion gallery, store and wellness center, located just at the edge of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, is a locus of cool happenings. The latest two, occuring simultaneously in the cavernous corner ground floor space, balance textile artist Nike Schroeder’s luminoous and delicate work with The Listening Garden, a meditative indoor landscape of greenery and sound.
On view through February 18th and presented with Walter Maciel Gallery, Counting The Days features Nike Schroeder’s pieces from Convex/Concave and Fragment series of abstractions. The Los Angeles-based artist, who recently moved to the West Coast from Germany, composes her work from multi-colored rayon threads that hang from custom made canvas panels. The fine filaments hang freely in a subtle rainbow of color that moves gracefully with the slightest breeze. As the viewer interacts with the work, breath and movement cause the fine filaments to dance and sway, making the invisible visual. Alongside the abstracted stitch work, porcelain faces with minimal white glaze and indistinctive black markings whisper streams of thread from their mouths. Meant to symbolize language, the threads interact with the architecture and twist around each other in a delicate, tangled contemporary Tower of Babel. The work was previously included in Schroeder’s 2015 solo exhibition inzwische at Walter Maciel Gallery.
On the south side of the gallery is Listening Garden. A lush, mesmerizing environment & installation by Natalie Mik, in collaboration with composer Gregory Lenczycki and artists Grace Eunchong, Kiyomi Fukui, Shea Vititow, it presents a contemporary translation of the kind of ancient gardens found in East Asia, where artists, scholars, and poets would meet over tea to meditate on life, art and nature. For more than two thousand years, these gardens were a physical extension of the people’s outlook on the world and a microcosm that was designed not merely to be a reproduction of the universe in miniature but a poetic, lyrical and artistic interpretation complete with its own vital spirit. Visitors are invited to prepare and drink a cup of tea. On Saturdays, Mik leads leading visitors to a contemplative viewing and listening experience. The upcoming month also hosts a yoga meditation, a karma cleaning, a live sound performance and a plant guided meditation.
Show + Tell Projects: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 6 PM, 374 E. Second Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
