Kicking off its 2025 programming, Koslov Larsen is pleased to present Object Impermanence, a group show featuring the works of Rosalba Breazeale, Julián Chams, and Amber Toplisek. Curated by Zan Zeller, Object Impermanence explores the art object as artifact, a tool for time-traveling, reaching back into the past and sustaining into the future. An artifact serves as a physical mark of the maker having existed in time, a testament to the perseverance of their legacy. What do we choose to preserve as part of our lineage?
The exhibition brings together photosculptural works which defy the bounds of the traditional photographic frame, as well as circumventing traditional media and presentation methods. The pieces feature natural imagery in fragmented and refracted forms—these incomplete forms synthesize to become something larger than themselves, a form of collectivism. Each artifact, crafted by the hand of the artist, holds personal memory as well as collective memory.
Rosalba Breazeale’s dimensional chemilumen prints in the series Symbiotic Relatives are part of an ever-expanding network of stories derived from conversations with the land. The Chemilumen involves the combination of Lumen printing process (combining light sensitive paper, objects, and sunlight) with additional chemicals and ingredients, many of which are grown and harvested by the artist. The works are then pruned—a symbiotic act between the artist and print, where the artist seeks not to control the outcome but to respond to the elements, imagining a world in which all beings live in symbiosis. Influenced by their background as a Queer, Jewish, transnational adoptee from Peru, Breazeale’s work addresses connection to land, immigration, and environmental justice.
Julián Chams crafts soft sculptural tapestries using images printed on fabric and jute, a natural textile sourced from Colombia. The images, all details of the natural landscape, were captured across the island of Puerto Rico at a time during the pandemic when he was unable to return to his native homeland of the Colombian Caribbean. The resulting artworks are a collection of moments, small windows in time reflecting an attempt to recreate a home away from home. The tapestries record fragments of the artist’s own history, yet reach deep into cultural psyche to weave together strands of memories intersecting through time and space.
Amber Toplisek’s works engage with representation on the subconscious level, exploring the network of images that reside within. Appropriating found images largely sourced from eBay listings, Toplisek prints on glass, retracing the photographic lineage from its origins on glass plate negatives to its current mode of mass dissemination, the phone screen. Investigating multiples, repetition, memory, motherhood, the passage of time and the traces left behind, these transparent glass and metal sculptures make tangible the immaterial network of images that float through the phantasmal space of the web, capturing moments in flux and anchoring them in the body and the physical realm.
The materials used by each artist reflect an inherent fragility within the artifact—natural fibers, glass, and cut paper. These objects elucidate a desire for legacy, and a recognition of the futility of it without collective memory.
Object Impermanence will be on view from January 10 through February 28, 2025.
