ESCHER’S LOVERS: Lauren Clay & Nicholas Moenich
KDR305, Miami

Sept 4 - Oct 9, 2022

KDR305 presents Escher’s Lovers, a two-person exhibition by artists Lauren Clay and Nicholas Moenich.

The gallery is transformed into a mesmerizing space by Lauren Clay’s illusionistic wallpaper pulling the viewer into an Escher-like dimension. Works sit atop the complex wallpaper, with areas of negative space extending inward as Nicholas Moenich’s paintings and Clay’s sculptures hang simultaneously, bringing forth a variety of pictorial spaces and materials - sucking the viewer in and pushing the picture plane out, suggesting multiple entries and exit points. Architectural fragments appear, disappear, and reappear again.

Body-like and serpentine structures slip in and out. Referencing psychedelics, illuminated manuscripts and high modernism drift abound, implying a possible quest for a fictional utopia- round and round and up and down - just as an Escher staircase would. Eyes stare back to pause the viewer - “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.”

Up the stairs, a tiny respite hangs after one physically ascends. Knotted and fragmented forms overflow, and two drawings, one from each artist, hangs in the balance with perfect tension to compliment one another- a snake and a garden, repulsion, and attraction- implying that some sort of transcendence may be possible if only in the fleeting present.