Object Impermanence: Rosalba Breazeale, Julián Chams, and Amber Toplisek

JAN 10 - FEB 28, 2025

  • 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? This 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.  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.

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  • Amber Toplisek
    Amber Toplisek, Miriam, 2024

    Amber Toplisek

    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.
  • About the Artist Amber Toplisek (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, GA. Her work explores the network of...

    About the Artist

    Amber Toplisek (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, GA. Her work explores the network of images that reside within, functioning as an imperceptible alchemy that influence and guide our lives. By embedding once-immaterial images into tangible structures, she aims to amplify the potential for images to coalesce within the viewer's physical body. Toplisek’s work engages with different methods of obfuscation and utilizes both kinetic and still interventions in order to investigate and extend an encounter with a photographic image.

     

    Toplisek received her MFA in 2024 from the University of South Florida and her BFA in 2018 from Georgia State University. She has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows across the US and in the UK. Toplisek is currently a lecturer at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University.

     

    “To look at Amber Toplisek’s works is to be conscious of one’s senses in the act of perceiving. What does it mean to see one seeing or to hear one hearing? This becomes the crux of her work, the unfolding of the act of sensing and its relation to human experience and understanding. As such, the objects she makes place the viewer in various stages between still and moving, seen and unseen, material and immaterial, and rising and descending.” — Colin Edginton, 2024, artist profile on Amber Toplisek

  • Julián Chams

    Julián Chams, Colección #6 (Cielo y rocas, Vieques), 2023

    Julián Chams

    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.

  • About the Artist

    Julián Chams (he/they) is a visual artist from Colombia based in Brooklyn and Barranquilla. His multimedia work encompasses sculpture, photography, textiles, and painting, reflecting a deep interest in time, nature, and their inextricable connection. He has exhibited nationally and internationally in venues such as the Embassy of Colombia in Madrid with the Museo Nacional of Colombia, the Bates College Museum of Art, the Center for Visual Art at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Homework Gallery, and Foro Space, among others. He has also participated in the XV and XVI Caribbean Regional Artists’ Salons in Colombia and NADA Art Fair, as well as in artist residencies at BRIC and Wave Hill in New York.

  • Rosalba Breazeale: Symbiotic Relatives

    Rosalba Breazeale, Symbiotic Relatives: Mint and Madder, 2021

    Rosalba Breazeale: Symbiotic Relatives

    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.

  • About the Artist

    Rosalba Breazeale (they/them)received their MFA from the University of New Mexico and their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their multidisciplinary art practice encompasses analog, digital and alternative process photographic sculpture, videography, installation, and fiber art with an emphasis on regenerative practice. Breazeale’s identity as a Queer, Jewish, transnational adoptee from Peru forms the foundation from which they create work addressing connection to land, immigration, and environmental justice.

    They have exhibited their work internationally including Transmutation with the London Alternative Photography Collective in Margate, England, Seeds in the Soil, a collaboration between Soil Art Gallery in Seattle, WA and Indigo Arts Alliance, Time Change / Change Time II at Biggins Gallery in Auburn, AL and their solo exhibition, Poems From Kay Pacha at Parsonage Gallery in Searsport, Maine.

    Breazeale’s interest in regenerative photographic processes granted the opportunity to teach a topics class on the subject at the University of New Mexico and to be published in the Sustainable Darkroom’s 2022 publication, Re Source. They were chosen as one of Strata Gallery’s 2022-23 Emerging Artists in Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, received the David C. Driskell fellowship in 2023 and attended a residency at Hewnoaks in 2024. Breazeale currently resides in Portland, ME while working on a SciArt collaboration with scientist, Jessica Begay, entitled 500 Unheard Legacies, which will be presented at the 2025 Society of Photographic Education conference in Reno, Nevada.