Terrarea, Cabbages, 2016
Terrarea is a collective comprised of Janis Demkiw, Emily Hogg, and Olia Mishchenko. Terrarea’s working methodology involves forms of kinesthetic communication with and through object-play, spatial parameters or possibilities, and chance happenings occurring through experimentation. Terrarea’s work evolves out of what they call a “bin of stuff” or a “box of infinity:” a growing collection of objects and curiosities (some of which are in duplicate or triplicate) to which each artist has contributed over the past five or so years. “Combining everything with everything. This is their flour.” (Objects, 106) Responsive, allusive, and always proliferating, Terrarea’s arrangements take into account the objects’ relations to each other as well as the specific sites in which they are presented. Shadow, mirroring, and mobility play a role in their compositions and the artists often introduce different spatial planes to their arrangements or use pulleys, rotating platforms, and fans to animate objects.
For Rehearsal for Objects Lie on a Table, the artists began by compiling a list of all the objects mentioned in the play, combing through their collection for substitutions / equivalents / displacements / replacements—a process of auditioning the “cast.” Objects perform as stand-ins, stunt doubles and understudies, form scenarios, and do other things—like make “still life” compositions as they rehearse the play, sometimes one line at a time. Terrarea employ a variety of surfaces and spaces (including the gallery’s storage space and the custom-designed “tables”) to arrange their work and rearrange the composition of the exhibition’s floorplan as they do do.
For the opening of the exhibition, Terrarea arranged an inverted object ikebana (a.k.a. rigging) hovering over the roundtable. This configuration was for Stein as much as it was for Gabriel Levine’s Object Banquet. For the latter, a food addition in the form of dangling crudité (otherwise recognized as a Brussel sprout bead curtain with 24 carrots). The composition was intended to flirt with Diane Borsato’s arrangement, which was created as the table centre piece for the Objects Banquet.
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