The Measure Of All Things(And Those That Are Not)

"Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not." Protagoras as quoted by Plato, "Protagoras or the Sophists" The Measure Of All things (and those that are not) presents the work of Isabelle Zetterström, Lucia Rossi, Ewelinka Dochan and Theodore Wilkins-Lang, curated by COMEDY OF MENACE and Marta Przygodzka. The exhibition also marks the first activity of an exhibition space – Broncko Bianchi – at Apiary Studios, run by the collective and Przygodzka; welcome to the housewarming. homo mensura is a classical doctrine that relativistically measures all of the cosmos – even the unknown – through “man’s” scale, such as the use of feet and inches as measuring units. The notion has since come to underpin Western anthropocentrism, cementing the man-measure in the normative, white masculine body and perpetuating its violent exercise in world-building as a romantic pursuit of the ideal. The four artists on show variously disturb these scales and their applicability in a world where weirder shit is always going on. In Zetterström’s paintings, extraterrestrial landscapes are suffused with alien organs, collapsing the divisions between interior and exterior and opening up worlds and embodiment stranger than ours in both scales and poetics. Rossi presents a series of bronze casts all derived from the same handheld mirror, fragments of a Narcissus story centred on its armature rather than its subject, an exercise in baroquely alchemical simulacra-production. Informed by their training in fibrous plastering and placement at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Dochan expands standardised mould-making and casting techniques into contemporary forms, revealing the material matter of being and death-driven abjection at its core. And in Wilkins-Lang’s works, large-format darkroom portraits negotiate the traditions of religious icon-building, closing with Revelation, a serendipitously developed light leak found on three-decade-old camera film from Cleveland, Ohio.