PRACTICE Gallery is proud to present Skies, an exhibition of work by Rebecca Tennenbaum and Todd Stong.

So much of our world is organized according to naturally occurring cycles: a calendar based on lunar cycles, the course of a day dependent on sleep patterns, life cycles, weather patterns. As we navigate these cycles, we must be aware of how we impose rationality onto them, and recognize the tension that exists between the natural world and human convenience. The sun sets every evening through the back-room window regardless of when my phone recognizes the change in brightness, it rises to wake me although my alarm hasn’t rung.

Through repeating shapes and references to nature, Skies celebrates, ritualizes, subverts, exalts, and attempts to make sense of our place within natural cycles while also trying to understand how we fit into the artificial structures that we’ve grown accustomed to and upon which we depend to organize our lives.

About the Artists:

Todd Stong creates figurative narratives that explore desire and pain in the contexts of queer sexuality, art history, and landscape. Combining various topics and fantasy with western art historical forms and motifs, his work considers how individuals across time have worked simultaneously within and against larger systems of visual political power.

Rebecca Tennenbaum questions the position of the individual in constructing the frameworks around their decisions. Despite all the systems we exist within and the objects we interface with, we are fundamentally held by the cycles of nature. Through contemplating the continuous unfolding of time as demonstrated by the ocean, land, and sky, she highlights the absurdity of living with our own patterns.