Unknown Entry Point
July 3.- Aug. 31., 2024
The Bellslip Gallery, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY
Curated by Romina Jiménez Álvarez (NY)

Margrethe Aanestad, Maria-Garcia Donosco, Felipe Fredes, Natsumi Goldfish, Katie Hubbell, Kelly Olshan, and Paul Tucci

Photos by: KC Crow Maddux, Jan Inge Haga, Romi Studio, Garrett Carroll

Exerpct from the press release: 

- Installed within a residential building, the exhibition mirrors our contemporary condition—eyes flickering between screens and surroundings, bodies navigating increasingly “phygital” terrains. Drawing on Shumon Basar’s concept of the 2.5th Dimension—between visual interface and embodied experience—the exhibition operates on two levels: first, in the perceptual state of the viewer, oscillating between their phone and the physical world around them; and second, in the artworks themselves, which blur across media, extend off the wall, and resist legibility. Meaning arises not through recognition, but through friction, tension, and spatial interference.

The title Unknown Entry Point is inspired by the 1998 sci-fi film Sphere, in which an alien intelligence discovered at the bottom of the ocean becomes a mirror for human subconscious fears and desires. The alien offers no explanation—its presence alone is enough to destabilize and transform. In this exhibition, the Bellslip’s silver-finned walls become the rolling sands of the ocean floor, a site of alien contact and unknowable depth. Like the gold Sphere in the film, the artworks here do not explain themselves. Each work reflects the internal workings of the artist, and the viewer completes the encounter through thought. As Hermann Hesse once warned, “Ah! In fifty years the earth will be a graveyard of machines, and the soul of the spaceman will simply be the cabin of his own rocket!” The artworks themselves are analog and digital machines—sensory instruments and transmitters—reverberating across space and time.

Margrethe Aanestad’s gold painting sets the stage—literally and metaphorically. Positioned as the first work a viewer encounters in the gallery, her golden circle echoes the alien orb from Sphere (1987)—mysterious, silent, reflective. Like the Sphere, it does not explain itself. Rendered with precision and subtle depth, the circle becomes a portal—an opening rather than an image. From this entry point, the exhibition unfolds through perceptual thresholds.

Unknown Entry Point does not offer closure; instead, it lives in contradiction. The exhibition could be unfolding in 1825 or 3025. Romi Studio, ever-nomadic and ever-collaborative, emerges again not with answers, but with a deepened commitment to the question. As John Cage once reflected on Schoenberg: “The answers have the question in common. Therefore the question underlies the answers.” This exhibition, too, is held together by its questions. The goal is not clarity—it’s duration. To keep you there, inside that question mark, a little longer.

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you — the ability to imagine. — Michael Crichton, Sphere (1987)

The All-World trembles; the All-World trembles physically, geologically, mentally, spiritually, because the All-World is looking for the point—not the station, but the utopian point where all the world’s cultures, all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another without dispersing or losing themselves. And that, I think, is utopia, above all. Utopia is a reality where one can meet with the other without losing himself. — Édouard Glissant

- Romina Jiménez Álvarez

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