where the palms nest

OUT of JOINT at The Boiler | ELM Foundation

April 29 - May 27, 2023

imago of a queer artist*

Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space | Artists Alliance Inc.

March 17 - May 13, 2023

Nested in a Place of Becoming | Adler Guerrier & Levani

Kunsthalle Tbilisi, Georgia

September 22 - October 26, 2022

what color is the Black Sea?

Marisa Newman Projects, NY

March 8 - May 12, 2021

The Immigrant Artist Biennial

EFA Project Space, New York

September 9 - October 24, 2020

Levani's Room: AMERICA

(Temporary installation during the lockdown, March - May 2020)

Levani's Room: HOME

SPRING/BREAK Art Show NY

March 3 - 9 , 2020

I Should Have Kissed You Longer

Solo presentation at TAF'19, May 16-19, 2019

Here is Always Somewhere Else

BRIC Biennial Vol.3

February 7 - April 7, 2019

In Search of The Miraculous, 2018

Solo presentation at NADA Miami, December 6-9, 2019

Here

2017

Georgian National Museum, Mestia

In Between

2017

State Silk Museum, Tbilisi

song of the violets (reevolution), 2024

song of the violets

2024

[word “reevolution” constructed from the Georgian civic script from the 11th to 18th centuries]
violet neon, 195 x 990 cm

იების სიმღერა

2024

[ასოები ამოკრებილია ქართული მხედრული ანბანის განვითარების ნიმუშებიდან მე-11-დან მე-18-ე საუკუნეებამდე]
იისფერი ნეონი, 195 x 990 სმ

song of the violets

2024

[word “reevolution” constructed from the Georgian civic script from the 11th to 18th centuries]
violet neon, 195 x 990 cm

იების სიმღერა

2024

song of the violets

2024

[word “reevolution” constructed from the Georgian civic script from the 11th to 18th centuries]
violet neon, 195 x 990 cm

იების სიმღერა

2024

song of the violets

2024

[word “reevolution” constructed from the Georgian civic script from the 11th to 18th centuries]
violet neon, 195 x 990 cm

იების სიმღერა

2024

imago of a queer artist*

Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York | March 17 – May 13, 20

*imago of a global south-born, lenapehoking-based queer artist to investigate the material, cosmological, and psychological dimensions of existence; to collapse dichotomies and identity categories; to offer an iconography of pluriversal belonging; to inspire empathy, solidarity, and care.

"imago of a queer artist*" is inspired by the phenomena of holo metabolism (complete metamorphosis) that certain life forms undergo during their life cycles. This complex development at one point implies a complete liquefication of the entire body of a living being - when the individualized cells (such as bone, cartilage, and muscle cells) transform back to the primal - stem cell - and from this new matter, a new body is built.

The works in the show are the markers of all four stages (egg, larva, pupa, imago/adult) of this development and flirt with its cosmological, spiritual, and socio-political potentialities. One (among many) fascinating players in this transformation are imaginal discs - a sac-like epithelial structure found inside the larva. During the pupal stage, once the entire body of the larva becomes a liquid mass, the imaginal discs turn into the external structures of the head, thorax, limbs, and genitalia. Imaginal discs are versatile, responsive, and modular tissues. Internal regulatory processes determine their development and communicate and interact with other larval organs to influence growth and developmental timing. They begin acting not as discrete individual cells but as a multi-cell organism – and a new body is born.

One of the main reasons behind "imago of a queer artist*" is to rethink the "art world" and its constitutive elements (art, art-making, artist)- not as an individualistic fetish in its end - but as a shared effort of many and most of the times uncredited, invisible work.

This show wouldn't have happened without the equal dedication, love, expertise, generosity, and labor of an incredible team of Artists Alliance Inc: Jodi Waynberg, Alessandro Facente, Teri Newman, Lulu Meng, Emilie Sano, Robert Drach, Brad Farwell; Of very dear friends -old and new- David Lomtadze, Simon Gamgebeli, Papuna Dabrundashvili, Giogri Mjavandze. The support of Vida Signs - marking five years of working together.

And, of course, there are peers, kins, loves, and obsessions from different time-spaces who inspired, encouraged, guided, challenged, and helped.

Press Release

Exhibition Page on ArtistsAllianceInc

Installation view.

March 17 – May 13, 2023

Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York. Photo: Brad Farwell.

Installation view.

March 17 – May 13, 2023

Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York. Photo: Brad Farwell.

_epilogue:prologue_

2021

color pencil, pen, ink, marker on newsprint, walnut frame

Photo: Brad Farwell.

instar*

2023

stainless steel sanitizing box, syringe and glass beakers from 1980’s, gauze, dry flowers, aragonite, snowflake obsidian, faux pearl, atlantic ocean red algae, soy wax casts of human genitalia, stone shelf.

*an instar is a developmental stage of arthropods, such as insects, between each moult, until sexual maturity is reached.

Photo: Brad Farwell.

instar*

2023

*an instar is a developmental stage of arthropods, such as insects, between each moult, until sexual maturity is reached.

Photo: Brad Farwell.

imago of dragonflies mating

2023

color pencil on mylar

Photo: Brad Farwell.

what color is the black Sea?

what color is the Black Sea? 2021

Artist’s photograph silkscreened with oil on latex fabric, tangerine tree in glass aquarium, horticulture growing lights, oil on green latex in folded brass frame, corroded brass sheet, stone from the black sea shore, plant in lab glass vase, marble weight holders, brass incense holder, on aluminum sheet mounted on plywood and steel; Palm tree wrapped in natural la

what color is the Black Sea? 2021

Blacked-out white neon, 6 x 63 inches (Edition of 5)

what color is the Black Sea? 2021

Blacked-out white neon, 6 x 63 inches (Edition of 5).

what color is the Black Sea? 2021

Installation view

what color is the Black Sea? 2021 (detail).

what color is the Black Sea?

by Lilly Wei

That’s the intriguing but also rather curious question that is the title of a new work—and the exhibition—by Georgian artist Levan Mindiashvili. He adds to it studies for a “Book of Patterns (Morphemes of my Consciousness)” that consist of other significant objects from his childhood.

The exhibition is carefully, ceremonially staged as a “psychological tableau,” as he dubs it, conjuring an experience from the artist’s earliest memories. Most of these objects are placed to be viewed from a child’s height.

An elegant, planar fixture with grow lights drops a few feet down from the ceiling, suspended by wires. Shades of a ravishing, alchemizing magenta illuminate everything within its range, creating a hothouse-like ambience. Draped through it on the left cascading to the ground is a double-plied natural latex curtain that suggests flesh, stripped from the body’s architecture. Its color, without the grow lights, approximates the artist’s skin tones. The back panel is longer and sweeps across the floor in an haute couture swirl. The room seems to expand and contract, under the spell of the incandescent pinks that he persuades us is surely the color of memory.

Silkscreened onto the latex skin, a tattoo of sorts, is a positive and negative version of a snapshot of the artist as a cherubic, naked three-year old, seated on a rock, knee-deep in the sea, engrossed. There is a teasing note handwritten by his mother scribbled across the photo: “as you turned me black at the Black Sea, now turn me white at the White Sea.”

A hazily reflective metal platform that mimics water functions as the installation’s base, floating a few inches above the floor. On it is a potted tangerine tree, some additional stones, a photo of one of those stones, a branch snaking gracefully out of a clear beaker of water, and other similar objects. Recurrence is frequent in this project. Alongside the platform is a child-sized edition of a kind of hassock that is jauntily trimmed in fake orange fur. Peering in, there is a short video loop of a hedgehog, an amiable creature that was Mindiashvili’s earliest awareness of an existence distinct from his own.

Hung on the wall behind this installation is an image of a child’s gridded chalkboard, one of three that refers to a common tool used to teach reading, a process dependent upon rote but also on a leap of the imagination. My Consciousness Patterns is spelled out on them, one word per board, in Georgian script. There are also a number of framed silkscreened remnants of his cherished baby blanket, no longer in one piece.

Standing against the wall to the right as if in the wings of a theatre, waiting to make its entrance, is a palm tree, its base swaddled in a vintage fur coat, cast in the character of a matriarch that seems both comedic and forceful, beloved and feared. Next to it, in white neon, is the central text: what color is the Black Sea? The words facing the viewer are painted black, but the light of the reverse side bounces off the wall, brilliantly haloing them.

Mindiashvili’s question might seem straightforward at first, but he doesn’t ask it flippantly and it becomes increasingly complicated as the exhibition points to the slipperiness of memory and its encryptions. Autobiography is not his concern as he proposes different methodologies of representation and analyses that are both verbal and visual, to see past events in the present tense, from other perspectives. Yet the exhibition inevitably refers to what particularly concerns him. For instance, it might allude to blackness in Georgia and its cultural and social implications which differ from what constitutes blackness in the United States (although hierarchies, discrimination and inequities are not monopolies of either country, of any country). That perpetrates other questions. As a Georgian, for instance, is he European, Asian, or Eurasian, and if the latter, does he incline more East or West, leading to yet other questions about identity such as queerness and intersectionality.

“What color is the Black Sea?” is a kind of trick question with countless responses but no ultimate answer. For Mindiashvili, the exhibition focuses on consciousness and the capture of foundational moments in the construction of self, a framework for reassembling memories and reconsidering them. It is a renovation of sorts, an amelioration, poignant glimpses backward that lead forward.

Levani's Room: AMERICA

Levani's Room: AMERICA (“I STAND AT THE window of this great house [...] as night falls. The night that is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many t

Levani's Room: HOME, 2020

Installation view.

Steel modular structure, sublimation dye on translucent fabric, neon, fluorescent lights, 16 hand-painted liquid mirror panels, clamps, sound. Room 14' x 11' x 9'

Levani's Room: HOME, 2020

Installation view.

Steel modular structure, sublimation dye on translucent fabric, neon, fluorescent lights, 16 hand-painted liquid mirror panels, clamps, sound. Room 14' x 11' x 9'

Levani's Room: HOME, 2020

Installation view.

Steel modular structure, sublimation dye on translucent fabric, neon, fluorescent lights, 16 hand-painted liquid mirror panels, clamps, sound. Room 14' x 11' x 9'

Levani's Room: HOME, 2020

Installation view.

Steel modular structure, sublimation dye on translucent fabric, neon, fluorescent lights, 16 hand-painted liquid mirror panels, clamps, sound. Room 14' x 11' x 9'

Levani's Room: HOME, 2020

Installation view.

Steel modular structure, sublimation dye on translucent fabric, neon, fluorescent lights, 16 hand-painted liquid mirror panels, clamps, sound. Room 14' x 11' x 9'

Levani's Room: HOME, 2020

Installation view.

Steel modular structure, sublimation dye on translucent fabric, neon, fluorescent lights, 16 hand-painted liquid mirror panels, clamps, sound. Room 14' x 11' x 9'

Levani's Room: HOME | SPRING/BREAK Art show NY | 2020

Referencing James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” (1956) – a seminal book in the history of queer literature, it is a love story between two men, that begins and ends in a rented room. Within this space, David -a white American - tells his story all the while looking at a reflection of himself in the window.

As the opening paragraph makes it clear, the book is as much about the denial of the right to love, as it is about race, colonial history and guilt, class inequality, and privilege. “Giovanni’s Room” is also the first queer story I read in which I could relate to the protagonist’s fears, and to the personal struggle with imposed cultural structures. After my journey in Argentina first, and now in New York, where I can finally claim a room in Bushwick as my home, I start to tell my story of becoming, told through the reflections of my culture, history, and experiences. A real-size print of my room on a sheer fabric will become the setting for most of the presentations - “Rooms,” that will entail exhibitions, performances, podcast, communal dinners, and raves. It will culminate in an all-encompassing artist book and an online archive.

The first iteration, “Home” held at Spring/Break NY, explores the sense of belonging and community, and the role of Brooklyn’s underground rave culture in my inclusion of New York’s creative scene. Playfully titled “HOME EP,” a set of 15 “tracks” depict architectural details of my apartment along with the logos of underground venues and clubs, parties, and mailing lists, flyers, and other memorabilia.

The soundscape of this installation, co-curated with Arthur Kozlovski, features sets from the raves that had significant importance for me, along with specially created ones. "Home" also marks the first iteration of our ongoing collaboration that brings together traditional art-making and underground rave culture and explores the new ways of presenting them in different contexts. Among contributed artists are (in alphabetical order): Bouffant Bouffant, The Carry Nation, ChadKid, Double Body, Arturo Kozlov, DJ Leeon, Manu Miran, Punshukunshu, Xiorro, Wrecked (The list will be updated daily).

Specially designed wristband will grant access to the visitors of the fair to BASEMENT NY on Fiday night, March 6th.

________

*The artist would like to extend a very special Thank You to Eriola Pira for her help in developing the overall concept of “Levani’s Room.”