Ties That Bind

Brandon Ndife
February 23 - April 15, 2018

Opening reception: Friday, February 23, 2018 6-8pm

138 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002

SELECTED PRESS:
Flash Art

PRESS RELEASE:

Shoot The Lobster is pleased to present Brandon Ndife’s solo exhibition entitled Ties That Bind, on view through April 1, 2018. The show is a meditation between four new sculptures, on how things are connected: living, dead, organic, human.

Each work, at it’s root, wrestles with the ontologies and hierarchies of presence that contend with our present landscape; where objects and their meaning have their tendrils spreading outward. The multiplicity of interpretation takes on a likeness of something close to us but yet constantly emerging.

Ndife’s structures utilize found and unlikely objects, making them even more strange through his interventions. Through a series of mediations (casting, molding, collaging), the object is displaced by a shell, cast again to become a ghost or husk of the original. In each transformation, the original object becomes like a story passed down from generation to generation, mangled by interpretation until it’s likeness becomes completely it’s own - authored by everyone who has come in contact with it. The layered resin, paint, bones, and branches leave an anthropomorphic aura in the gallery.

A Brazil nut in Hempstead. Cassava root in Russia. The way materials move, change hands and are discarded, invokes broader social contexts of Globalization. Globalization has scattered time and place across, into, out of, and between the Earth. Man pushes nature pasts it’s limits only to lament in it’s destruction moments after.

With the ties that bind our fractured sense of the origin of places, the things across temporal and physical landscapes is our eventual ending.

I remove a blade of grass from the meadow. Is there still a meadow?
            Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, 2016

— Ebony L. Haynes

Brandon Ndife (B. 1991 Hammond, IN) lives and works in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Recent exhibitions include: Just Passin’ Thru, Interstate Projects, (Brooklyn, NY), Group show, Halsey Mckay (New York, NY), Meanderthal, Species, (Atlanta, Georgia), and Dinner That Night, Bureau, (New York, NY).