Unlimited Supply : SPRING/BREAK Art Show Presentation
For our participation in the Special Projects category at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2023, CH64 Gallery presents Unlimited Supply, a show comprising works by four artists from Tbilisi, Georgia. In subject matter, the presentation addresses themes of excess in power, production, pollution, and consumption while materially indulging in maximalism as multiple media and forms of fabrication are brought together in the selected works. The overall installation evokes a sense of urban life, where we find ourselves fighting for all that we are conditioned to want while surrounded by construction sites, overflowing trash cans, unfettered consumption of fossil fuels, and the resulting denigration of our environment.
For Mishiko Sulakauri, Gvantsa Jishkariani, Sandro Pachuashvili, and Tiko Imnadze, art-making is deeply informed by autoethnography. Their practices are driven by the need to analyze the social, economic, and political environment around them and interpret the impact that the imbalance of power, justice, and wealth has on their lives, identities, and communities.
Set against the backdrop of spray-painted, corrugated aluminium sheets hangs a painting of a foot wearing a tattered Nike shoe, having just stepped in dog feces. This work by Sandro Pachuashvili was created following a pandemic-induced harsh lockdown in Tbilisi and depicts the moment of stepping out into the world as the chokehold of the extreme restriction is lifted. Pachuashvili’s piece introduces an element of humor into the otherwise hard-hitting group of works. He uses comedy to explore the hardships encountered in the mundane every day, often presenting dramatized and exaggerated scenes to convey the profoundly ordinary.
Sandro’s second work is a repurposed trash can from the streets of Tbilisi that has been melted and marked with a prohibition pictogram depicting a person alongside the sun and the moon, enveloped in flames holding an overturned ram’s horn, which is a traditional wine vessel used for special toasts. The trash can speaks to the materiality our understanding of the world is informed by and the act of ridding and discarding. It is a prompt to selectiveness, thrifting through the accumulation of things and ideas around us, and being decisive about what is worth presenting and preserving; it appeals to our cultural and moral value judgments.
Honing in on the personal is Gvantsa Jishkariani’s fierce mosaic self-portrait with a string of shattered beer bottle glass and beads cascading from her head into her mouth and beyond. Eating glass and chewing on her own blood, Jishkariani puts her unapologetic and uncompromising strive for more, for a better, bigger, grander future, on display. The ever-growing challenges, contrasted with her limitless desire for success, produce a potent self-mythology that fuels the artist’s creative process. Gvantsa’s tapestry continues the tale of her struggle and pursuit of enhancement. The work spells out her disappointment with the abundance of insecurity and instability in her country as the institutional systems malfunction en mass.
Continuing and reframing the subject of failing systems, the three petrol pistols with crosses draped over them represent the unchecked forces of capitalism and the sanctification of lucrative resources regardless of their impact on human health and the natural world. Tiko Imnadze uses the combination of salvaged petrol pistols and crosses to demonstrate the boundlessness of systemically entrenched forms of power in Georgia and globally.
Flanked by this amalgam of works dealing with universal yet concurrently hyper-localized issues sit the largest piece, a monochromatic representation of the air we breathe. Mishiko Sulakauri’s work, Black Spot, named after Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, is a warning sign and a form of activism. When the artist conceived this series, he created over 200 pieces of paper covered in vehicular exhaust soot. He sent 20 of them to the Mayor of Tbilisi to draw attention to the poisonous air quality. The black carbon prints created by placing paper in the exhaust pipes of public transport vehicles are arranged on a large-scale frame to mimic the sky saturated with this substance. This is a conversation with the atmosphere and a call to push the breaks before our excesses tip the scales and turn the sky black.
