Shoestring Studio (640 Classon Ave, Brooklyn 11238)
October 19 – November 18, 2018
Opening: October 19, 6-8pm
“La-Z-Boy” is the signature title given to a very comfortable American reclining chair, the epitome of capitalist comfortability and drowsiness. In this two-person show, Eva Davidova and Daniela Kostova explore the connection between natural disasters and contemporary capitalist culture. By presenting site-specific print-installations the artists raise crucial questions about our role and responsibility in producing and reacting to our own creations.
In her recent project Global Mode/Playground for Drowning Animals, 2016-2018, Eva Davidova creates a surreal environment of invented animals that point a gun at themselves. These female animals express human kind and our unique ability to create and destroy at the same time. In her new VR piece Narcissus and Drowning Animals, 2018, Davidova takes the user on a journey into a psychedelic reality where animals drop from the sky into the user’s arms and pull the participant with them as they drown into deep waters.
Daniela Kostova’s The Higher Ground, 2018, is a site-specific photographic installation that questions prominent values in American culture. In this scene, an all-American male sits comfortably on a red reclining chair in the midst of a flood. With his cellular phone in hand, a cowboy hat, and Coca-Cola cans around him, he is stranded. A young girl, the future generation, clings to the edge of the billboard that frames this complex moment. Filled with humor and tragedy, the installation winks at advertising and an ongoing ability to deny our own failures.
The element of water exists as an undermining theme in these two projects and refers to flood myths, which destroy civilization as an act of divine punishment only to lead to a construction of a new world.
