I SET MY FACE TO THE HILLSIDE CURATED BY IAN COFRE

March 12 – April 24, 2022

All-Day Opening Saturday, March 12, 1 – 6 pm

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—PS122 Gallery is pleased to present i set my face to the hillside, a group exhibition featuring eight current and recent resident artists from the Painting Space 122 Project Studio Residency, including Clare Churchouse, Deville Cohen, Marley Freeman, Shadi Harouni, Christopher K. Ho, Sophie Kitching, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Hernán Rivera Luque. The exhibition is on view from March 12 – April 24, 2022.

PS122 Gallery presents i set my face to the hillside, a group exhibition featuring eight current and recent resident artists who participated in the Painting Space 122 Project Studio Residency, including Clare Churchouse, Deville Cohen, Marley Freeman, Shadi Harouni, Christopher K. Ho, Sophie Kitching, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Hernán Rivera Luque. Curated by Director Ian Cofré, the exhibition focuses on the politics of spaces, both small and large, through the artists’ deconstructive and reconstructive gestures. Borrowing its title from the enigmatic track by the band Tortoise from their record TNT, the exhibition takes the hillside as a stand-in for multiple struggles, and an inevitable confrontation that can be averted, scaled over, or bored through. i set my face to the hillside attempts to frame these works and their circumscribed intentions as assertions of agency, the first step of which is to turn into the onslaught of the unknown.

Churchouse and Rivera Luque work directly on the wall, employing materialities that forgo the support to create tenuous pictures that challenge formal orthodoxies and expectations in painting. Freeman and Premnath take on literal and metaphorical building blocks to stage an unbuilt world of possibilities; Freeman’s sculptures and paintings echo potential spatial manipulations, while in Premnath’s documented immigrant story, the individual gives voice to the conviction and striving of the collective that continues to regenerate and transform our nation.

Harouni’s Drawing for a Sculpture reveals the plans for one of the sculptures concurrently on view in her solo exhibition at Galleria Tiziana Di Caro (Napoli, IT) that “form new architectural spaces[….] composed [of] elements reflect[ing] the desires, ideals, broken promises and possibilities of contemporary human dwellings.” Also on view is a 2015 video by Harouni engaged in a self-conscious and futile gesture of mining a quarry hill by hand, but whose persistence and bystanders’ narration help to amass a lode of meaning. Kitching’s neon installation in an interstitial space that is visible from the street, as well as her painting in the West Gallery, are self-referential gestures that refer to the architecture of the gallery and its surroundings. Cohen and Ho both present self-contained, transforming structures that highlight charged signs and geometries, in Ho’s case, referring to Kai Tak Airport, demolished the year after the United Kingdom returned Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China.

Participating Artists

Clare Churchouse, Deville Cohen, Marley Freeman, Shadi Harouni, Christopher K. Ho, Sophie Kitching, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Hernán Rivera Luque

i set my face to the hillside
March 12 – April 24, 2022
Free and Open to the Public, Friday – Sunday, 1–6pm
Masking Strongly Recommended

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