An Average Comet

Harkawik is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition in our newly built gallery at 88 Walker St in Tribeca, An Average Comet. Our first international survey since early 2022, Comet explores the reproduction of the exterior world in the artist’s studio, foregrounding contemporary views of mimesis, and looking at practices that copy, appropriate, borrow, recreate or otherwise duplicate. Mimesis is the foundational principle for both the oldest philosophical conceptions of visual art, and the most disposable present-day imagery. Its most simplistic meaning is enumerated by representational art, by capturing the world “out there” and reproducing it for the viewer. Mimesis is used to explain, on the one hand, a base impulse to imitate, to observe behavior and, without thinking, emulate it, and, on the other, a nuanced process by which essential features of the natural world are recreated but not reproduced, generating effects akin but by no means identical to their counterparts. It is difficult to imagine a model of visual art without mimesis, without a notion of reproduction. After all, what is the meaning of a world that is created from nothing? In this sense, mimesis might be thought of as a necessary condition of the other, simultaneously allowing for its possibility and exposing the “illusory whole” of dominant discourse. An Average Comet presents 30 contemporary artists engaged deeply in the recreation of phenomena, logics and conditions, situating them gently on a continuum between metaphoric and catachrestic activity, and suggesting a world that lingers quietly but insistently beyond the studio door.