To Be Present, Is To Be In Passage

STATION is delighted to present To Be Present, Is to Be in Passage, a group exhibition bringing together four artists who share an understanding of architectural thinking and the memory embedded in material. The exhibition features works by STATION represented artist Esther Stewart and guest artists Howard Arkley, Kien Situ and Alice Gong Xiaowen. Architecture holds two kinds of memory: the memory built into a structure by design and the memory a structure absorbs simply by standing. The first is intention. The second is time. Place is not something encountered only within experience; it is integral to the structure of experience itself, which is why the four artists in this exhibition hold so closely to material as a physical reminder of memory. Absence is considered here from a physical point of view: what is chosen to be left open and the space a structure leaves behind. Alice Gong Xiaowen and Kien Situ draw material from an existing system and reorient it into another: objects whose precision was once their purpose, now released from demand and function. Esther Stewart and Howard Arkley extend the same logic to the house itself, lifting its ornament into pure form. Each artist reconjures memory to create relics from what is slipping away, pushing what is embedded in place and material through an unexpected renewal. Howard Arkley appears courtesy of KALLI ROLFE CONTEMPORARY ART