Stephen Bram, Angela de la Cruz, Emi­ly Floyd, Joseph Kosuth, Angel­i­ca Mesi­ti, Cal­lum Mor­ton, Jan Nel­son, John Nixon, Rose Nolan, David Noo­nan, Chi­haru Shio­ta, Jen­ny Wat­son, Justene Williams
THE OBJECT SELF-DEFINED: IN HOUSE 2025

IN HOUSE presents salient ideas and cur­rent trends in the prac­tice of indi­vid­ual artists asso­ci­at­ed with Anna Schwartz Gallery. Begin­ning each gallery year, com­mis­sioned and exist­ing works are placed in a new con­text, ani­mat­ed through con­ver­sa­tion between diverse mate­ri­al­i­ty and approach.

The title of IN HOUSE 2025: ​‘The Object Self-Defined’ is derived from Joseph Kosuth’s ​‘Self-Defined Object’ [Orange], 1966 on the occa­sion of his 80^th Birth­day. A reminder of his chal­lenge to the for­mal qual­i­ty of the art object, cham­pi­oning, rather, art as idea.

David Noonan’s roman­tic works tell of beauty’s shad­ow with roman­tic objects being con­sumed by the dark, Angel­i­ca Mesiti’s pol­ished chimes are, beyond their sparkling brass, a morse code SOS. Emi­ly Floyd’s Cyril­lic let­ters spelling ​‘Gulags in the Sun’ turn a palace into a camp. Jen­ny Wat­son presents a dis­en­chant­ed house, off­set­ting her nos­tal­gic sub­ur­ban hous­es of the 1970s. Jan Nelson’s Black Riv­er Run­ning #21, 2024 is a vis­cer­al response to the cur­rent state of the world.

Chi­haru Shio­ta cre­ates, with a sin­gle thread, the vast uni­verse. Angela de la Cruz con­tin­ues to rav­age the Mono­chrome with an anthro­po­mor­phic, pearl blue, ​‘mute’ sculp­tur­al wall work. Cal­lum Morton’s Mini Mon­u­ment is from his series of ​‘un-mon­u­ments’; wrong­ly scaled objects: a tiny pack­ing crate, memo­ri­al­is­ing all that work sit­ting in muse­um stor­age or worse, clog­ging up space in the stu­dio.

John Nixon asserts abstract, non-objec­tive art through the mono­chrome and the ready­made in Unti­tled (Red Mono­chrome with Cof­fee Pot), 1995. Justene Williams presents the antithe­sis of the objec­ti­fied women, the ​‘futur­ist woman’, reject­ing the lyri­cism and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the typ­i­cal female sculp­tur­al mon­u­ment. Rose Nolan presents the word ​‘think­ing’ as a dec­la­ra­tion, a mate­r­i­al pres­ence, its own object. Stephen Bram’s Unti­tled, 1990 flick­ers, seems to move slight­ly and sug­gests some­times less, some­times more, some­thing that can­not be identified.