The Ritual Division—a new artist-run space in Gowanus, Brooklyn that promotes art fabrication as a way of life announces its inaugural exhibition, Offerings, featuring the work of 15 emerging artists with a fabrication-focused practice. Whether sacred or secular, the act of offering is common to every human culture; each gift of sacrifice is both a gesture of devotion and an expression of the giver's desire for a future outcome. As the inaugural exhibition of The Ritual Division, Offerings seeks to foreground this tension between devotion and desire through the gallery space. The exhibition is also a devotional offering of The Ritual Division itself, given to its current and future community to cement our commitment to fabrication and artistic labor as a practice.
Each Offering is fabricated for this exhibition, reflecting the artists' practice and its journey.
Works were proposed to The Ritual Division in the conceptual stages through an artist call, and accepted proposals were able to access support through funding for fabrication, access to the Division's shop for building, and skill-sharing resources provided by its builder community. As an artist-run space devoted to the craft of art-making and the many rituals that make up an artistic body, The Ritual Division aims to create opportunities for ambitious artists to experiment with form, construction, and conceptual elements, and to invite our local communities to delight in the results.
Like any sacrifice, creating artworks requires one to set aside time and resources in order to speak to something larger than ourselves. The artists in Offerings have each created new works that put diverse ideas of dedication, ritual, belief, and creation into practice. Many works on view draw upon the idea of the altar, an original form of installation art that draws the aesthetic of offerings together with their function as desire-making actions. Works such as Griffin Garment's Cornucopia, Bailey Quinlan's HOT STUFF, and Shea Molloy's Kinetic Catharsis incorporate environmental and multi-sensory elements to draw their altars into dialogue with the spaces they inhabit and the people who share in the experience. Some Offerings respond to the creation and destruction cycles of sacrifice, asking what is given and toward what purpose, and what is taken away when we give of ourselves. For example, Dr. Corinne Brenner's PhD dissertation is slowly worn away in ll Faut, playfully reinterpreting the myth of Sisyphus. Others trace the shape of the people who build (or become) these objects of worship— especially in paintings, such as Saki Sonoda's Transformation in the Dark, depicting New York nightlife performers as they become transformed in dressing rooms, or California-based artist Deana Gore's powerful Reflect-telling their stories of becoming while absenting themselves. And everywhere, the artists in Offerings grapple with the multi-dimensional spectrum of the sacred and profane, calling in many different contexts, traditions, and relationships as they reclaim the magical and the divine for the everyday.
In the spirit of action that an offering demands, many of the artworks also invite the viewer to take part in the ritual through the performance of particular gestures of devotion. The Three Graces of the Lilim by Jessica Rosewillow, for instance, invites audiences to leave an offering expressing their desires and commitments, and lina putman's the altar of the city of dreams further compels participants to bring their offerings back into the city. Some also develop over time, literally wearing away (as in Foxie Lou's Terminal Generosity) or becoming more full (as in Emmo's Altar 1 (please let it be cancer) over the timeline of the exhibition. Through these gestures, Offerings invites artists and audiences alike to offer up the futures we would like to see.
Exhibition Details
October 4 - December 9, 2024
Fridays-Mondays, 11am-6pm and by appointment
Participating Artists
