in lieu is pleased to present Finders’ Lodge, an exhibition of new and largely collaborative work by Brook Hsu and Maren Karlson.
The exhibition’s title is derived from a passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s post-anthropocenic novel Always Coming Home. Of the passage, Le Guin states, “The Finders are rather uncharacteristic people of this valley - of Northern California - because they actually leave the valley and go elsewhere. Most of the people who live in the Valley of the Na River stay there. So this is a song to these people who leave the valley.”
The focal point of the exhibition is a central table covered with a clear vinyl tablecloth. Slops of Hsu’s signature puke- green ink coat the surface while drawings and sculptures by her and Karlson are placed throughout. For the opening, the artists have set the table with an array bread sculptures and herbed butter.
On the gallery walls, Hsu and Karlson have installed a set of two collaborative paintings. Each work functions as a sort of exquisite corpse wherein a single panel painting sits ush within a frame-shaped panel painting. Each center panel has been swapped, Hsu’s center panel sits within Karlson’s frame and vice versa. While the works exist separately, they are forever-linked. Elsewhere, a curtain composed of llama wool sections o a small nook. Inside a poem Hsu wrote as 6-year old is written on the wall and the sound of frogs ribbiting, as recorded by Karlson during a sleepless night post-surgery, plays softly through a speaker.
The world Hsu and Karslon have co-created in Finders’ Lodge exists as an homage to a deep friendship, an intimacy that burns brightly and finds its strength in stretching its limbs. In this hour, many artists find themselves reflecting on the precarity of our time with didacticism. It is difficult to consider any current artwork out of the context of our shared anxiety. Finders’ Lodge leans into kinship and, in doing so, offers an alternative.
