Drift
John Divola, Sebastián Espejo, Paulina Freifeld, Anatole Heger, Louise Lawler, Betty Parsons
June 27 – August 2, 2025
Public reception: Friday June 27, 6 – 8 pm
John Divola, Zuma #20, 1978, Archival pigment print, 40 x 50 in Edition 3 of 3, Courtesy the artist and Yancey Richardson
In his slim 1962 book The Shape of Time, George Kubler invented an art history of drift. According to Kubler, artworks live among the lumbering mass of all man made things. Every form emulates another imperfectly and propels an aimless tide of mishewn copies. Over time, the “drift is perceived and brought to order by an artist,” who slogs through the accretion and creates a new model, awash in idle foam.
Later that decade, drift was invented again. On the other side of the planet, Kunimitsu Takahashi oversteered his Nissan GT-R, screeching through hairpin turns. Keiichi “Drift King” Tsuchiya perfected the stylish, illegal art in the ‘80s on the switchbacks looping Mt. Fuji.
At Slip House, Drift is fast and slow. The exhibition gathers six artists who gently shape the fleeting imprints of accumulated presence, and who disturb spatial logics through clandestine strategy. Across photography, painting, sculpture, and installation, the show explores how surfaces hold evidence by fine tuning collected memories and burning tracks of contact and transformation.
Sebastián Espejo’s precisely weathered sculptural scenes hum with the charged quiet of places once occupied. Window sills, weeds, and brush organize traces of inhabitation and wilderness. John Divola’s California interiors meet Espejo’s gentle framings tête-à-tête, unsettling picturesque oceanscapes with blunt proof of dereliction. Sanctioned and illicit interventions scramble surface and depth by collapsing architect, inhabitant, vandal, and photographer.
Paulina Freifeld and Anatole Heger sift personal narrative and cultural memory. Freifeld’s lightbox drawings on rice paper layer painterly marks over a family photo taken in Chipultapec and a jaguar slumped into carrion by the Yucatán’s controversial Tren Maya. Downstairs, her deep blue sleepers lie in the same limbo between suspended snapshot and mortal wound. Heger’s twilight lagoon half-remembers, half-imagines his nomadic childhood in a parallel swerve from spellbinding recollection to dislocating dejá vu.
For Betty Parsons, legendary gallerist and early promoter of Abstract Expressionism, color and line wash in at highwater. Informed by the “sheer energy” of transatlantic travels and the mana of the midcentury avant-garde, her aquatic stripes surface in vibrant “islands” and slip over beached driftwood chunks.
Louise Lawler practices frictive reformatting that radiates from close scrapes. Her sound piece Bird Calls, installed in the gallery’s second-floor rotary phone, distorts the names of famed ‘60s male artists into avian caterwauls. Around the corner, a warped, re-photographed Gerhard Richter stretched to fit the wall rises like a heatwave: a seizure and a skid, tires smoking.
– Emeline Boehringer