Yu Rim Chung, Naomi Nakazato, Adam Langehough, Kevin Umaña, Jack Arthur Wood

Curated by Christopher Daharsh

May 20 - July 9, 2023

Sprout atop a muscular roll of hill, a thin beam sways and (occasionally) quivers in the wind. It is a transmitter and a receiver. It receives bits and bobs; shorn locks of rope and wire, a pierced shell of a food container and candy-like spheres that shine as orbiting planets. It acquires glimmers of blinding white reflections in grid configuration from an office building façade, which is itself receiving sunlight collected by waves sweeping the bay across from an elevated highway. It sees groupings of shifting agricultural plots and filtration meshes as one and the same, inhaling and exhaling in  harmony with the inhalations and exhalations of the nearby cities dotting the shore. It feels for swirls of sandy machine parts and plastic flora, wet and glistening on a nearby beach. 

This bowing antenna also transmits. It forms glimpses of the surrounding area; glitched maps come into view, dispelling a fog that limits the perception of our surroundings. It transmits cocktails of sonic, textural, aromatic and taste-bud-utilizing bits of information, transformed through synesthesia and divination. This transmitter broadcasts distillations of its world. It conveys signals to other antennae, which absorb them in a breath-like feedback loop. It becomes a game of pick-up sticks; the individual dowsing rods form a grid of chance, to be collected, maintained, filtered, numbered and admired. 

While moving through space and time, the artists in Universal Transmission form a bond with their environment. Yu Rim Chung’s asteroids of collected fragments of her world exemplifies this gravitational pull of the eyes, hands, nose, mouth, ears, pulling in material to form an eerily cohesive and pseudo-natural ecosystem. A la Nevelson, Adam Langehough’s work Cracked Open forms a tighter order to the chaotic nature of his day-to-day, where mechanical innards metastasize and bubble, and consumer packaging and machine tubes dissolve into an orderly rectangle. Naomi Nakazato’s work contains buggy mesh maps and geological core samples. She revisits once imperial landscapes, stretching pixelated lattice over them to gradually push aside a fog of war. Psychic, municipal and natural patterns laid into imperfect grids in Jack Arthur Wood and Kevin Umaña’s works are sifted into images recalling the shape crops take in a bird’s eye, or the broken shimmer of the sunset reflecting onto a tumultuous sea. 

The artist’s work gathered here are transmissions, their findings brought back from the front. They are messages that stimulate other antennae to receive and transmit, forming a contagious symbiotic breath in and out of sensorial phenomenon. These objects provide lenses for us to investigate and interpret our world; a celestial poking and prodding, and the evidence that the universe prods back.

-Christopher Daharsh