Nothing in That Drawer
Everett Babcock
Lage Egal, In the Rack Room
Liselotte-Herrmann-Straße 26, 10407 Berin
03.11.–03.12.2023
Everett Babcock
Emik is delighted to host Everett Babcock’s first solo exhibition, “Nothing in That Drawer”, with Lage Egal. Everett uses furniture from his own apartment and other commonplace things from his everyday surroundings to make the sculptures, wall works, and an installation exhibited at In the Rack Room. He combines various materials in response to their capacity to resonate with human conditions. These assemblages take on the form of characters that fluctuate between figuration and abstraction, and they flaunt their material moods, eliciting humor and peculiar emotions. The work aspires to make the relationship between feeling and substance, between us and things, more clear.
The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a Ron Padgett poem of the same name. When the 14 identical lines are read aloud, the words reveal their materiality, each utterance feeling different than the last; the words as repetitive vibrations become weird. These material reiterations are a kind of attentiveness that shows us the strange vitality and expressive capacity of things. In the exhibition, similar reiterations are spoken in the language of assemblage, where accumulated stuff is packed into once functional drawers; The drawers frame and squish the materials like a poem does to words. When these seemingly banal things are repeated in this format, the materials accentuate their emotive qualities, each bit plays a part in the whole; the matter as characteristic becomes uncanny.
The staging of things here, whether they be neatly stacked, energetically stuffed, slightly anthropomorphized, or traditionally hung on the wall, is a reaction to the affects of things.
The two most prominent sculptures are personae, part head part guts. The sculpture, “Square but Edgy”, has composure, its tidy contents follow the stacking logic of their own orderly forms. The calm textures and quiet colors put on a prim and proper attitude, but the indulgence of a bad habit suggests a longing to be cool, or perhaps the fragility of its poise.
The other sculpture, “Tender but Stuffy” is vulnerable and outwardly irritable. Its crammed cushiony insides try to hold back an outburst, and a squishy disgruntled expression is worn as it tries to insulate itself from the overwhelming loudness of everyone’s bullshit. It may be soft, but it is resilient and can absorb some hits.
The two most prominent sculptures are personae, part head part guts. The sculpture, “Square but Edgy”, has composure, its tidy contents follow the stacking logic of their own orderly forms. The calm textures and quiet colors put on a prim and proper attitude, but the indulgence of a bad habit suggests a longing to be cool, or perhaps the fragility of its poise.
The other sculpture, “Tender but Stuffy” is vulnerable and outwardly irritable. Its crammed cushiony insides try to hold back an outburst, and a squishy disgruntled expression is worn as it tries to insulate itself from the overwhelming loudness of everyone’s bullshit. It may be soft, but it is resilient and can absorb some hits.
Everett Babcock was born in Long Beach, California, USA, and now lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He received his BA in Fine Arts at UCLA in Los Angeles and is currently in a master program at UdK in Berlin.
As an interdisciplinary bricoleur, Everett’s playful practice most often begins with biographical elements, but it moves into a broader scope. He uses levity to deal with heavy themes like relocation, emotional distress, death, and incarceration. The character of everyday materials and commonplace actions is the foundation of his work, as he tries to show that the gap between mental and physical is illusory.
His approaches consist of collecting, curating, managing, carrying, organizing, balancing, assembling, reassembling, recreating, stacking, and bundling stuff. Dangerous stuff, harmless stuff, weird stuff, ordinary stuff. He regards these acts as both physical and psychological gestures that entail meaning and emotion, and he considers materials as actants, as things that do things in the world, not simply as passive matter that we influence, but as active agents that interact with us. Overabundance, planned obsolescence, and single use materials disregard this vitality of things in a culture of anti-materiality, and in response, Everett uses what he finds, his own possessions and those of others to make sculptures, paintings, videos, and performances.