Phantom Bodies: Brigitta Varadi + Seren Morey

Myth-making, memory and the presence of bodies both known and imagined are articulated in the artworks on view in the Phantom Bodies summer exhibition on view at The Yard, Williamsburg Bridge. Artists Brigitta Varadi and Seren Morey embrace unique materials in order to create bodies of work in dialogue with the natural world. Phantom Bodies features a range of visual textures for the viewer, evoking the various mysteries permeating the natural world, myths, fairy tales, memory and tradition. Contemporary art scholar Maurizia Boscagli remarks in her publication, “Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism” on the power of objects to carry layers of significance, probing the potential for objects… “to become totemic carriers of memory and affect 1 .” While Boscaglia’s research was centered around capitalist means of production, this observation holds true when examining objects, and artworks, that allude to the material world surrounding us in the natural sense. This intangible aspect of our ecological habitat finds expression in both Morey and Varadi’s practice, hinting at the subtle unity found in nature.

Artist Brigitta Varadi translates traditional practices in dialogue with the intersection of civilization and nature in her series of work incorporating wool into her (often) large-scale compositions. Embracing minimal color but evocative textures, works on view by Varadi trace the artist’s enduring involvement with local farmers she partnered with in Ireland, with bold areas of color indicating the way in which sheep were marked by flock. This mark-making and inscribing indicates her fascination with the process of recording memory. “I am working to record tradition,” observes Varadi. “I [am] awakening memory through the senses.” To Boscagli’s revelations, Varadi transposes, rather than creates, a new medium which serves as a totem for the lived experience of fauna: a ‘vessel’ by which memory is encountered by new audiences.

Artist Seren Morey creates texture-rich, impasto-laden works in her works such as Ingress and Enceladus. Visual weight ebbs and flows across the surface of Morey’s works, in which mixed media reveals, obscures and converges to create allusions to our natural environment. “I’m inspired by science and nature, and the underlying structure of things, as well as the idea that everything is made up of the same particulate matter,” remarks Morey. “Hybridization, molecular structures, [and] the repetitions of patterns [all interest me].” Morey’s detailed knowledge of microscopic structures informs the harmonious patterns and structures visible in her works such as Vortex, and her chosen, resilient medium of ultralight acrylic and pigment dispersions on substrate create new possibilities for translating these natural patterns into exciting, textural compositions.

On view from June 8- September 8, 2021, Phantom Bodies: Brigitta Varadi and Seren Morey translates nature’s invisible aspects to human scale, offering insights into the memory embedded within our environments.