Bathroom/Bathhouse

Agata Ingarden
concrete, metal reinforcement

A collaborative exhibition by Agata Ingarden and Irina Jasnowski Pascual. The installation divides the space into two rooms. The entryway is a is frame. In the space surrounding it, works expand and escape its primal forms. The augmented heat in the main gallery creates an atmosphere of evaporation and condensation. Caramel melts and drips onto the carpeted floor, clay dissolves in a warm tub, sculptures produce steam, images evaporate and condensate on the saran wrapped windows. Following the theme of changing states of matter, the two artists intervene with the space with transforming forms that distort the time around them.

“A sump is a low space that collects undesirable liquids such as water or chemicals. One common example of a sump is the lowest point in a basement, into which flows water that seeps in from the outside. If this is a regular problem, a sump pump may be used. A sump pump moves said collected undesirable liquids from inside the sump basin to outside the house. A sump is an indoor underground bucket, and its pump an upside down syphon to keep it empty. The sump pump allows a basement dryness, and thus a carpet, a couch, an xbox. The sump pump is noticed only when it fails and the basement floods. The waiting room is the sump pump made flesh. A waiting room basement under 6 inches of water makes the ankles cold, but the heart growth wander.”

— R. Cullen

Agata Ingarden, born in Cracow, Poland in ’94, lives and works in Paris. Studies at Ecole National de Beaux Arts (atelier Michel François and Dominique Figarella, Bernard Pifaretti, Sylvie Fanchon) and currently at Cooper Union School of Art in New York. Selected past exhibits: A Thousand Friends (part 2), curated by Elisa Rigoulet, New Jörg, Vienna, Austria, Il s’est passé quelques choses, curated by Eloi Boucher, PPROMOTION, Paris, France.

Irina Jasnowski Pascual lives and works in New York. She currently studies at The Cooper Union (BFA ’17). Selected past exhibits: JRR AND ROY curated by Hayley Martell at Signal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2016); 8:33 at 3434 Gallery with Autobody, Brooklyn, NY (2016); Outdoor Sunset at Sunset Drive Gallery, Miami, Florida (2015); Sublime at Autobody, Bellport, New York (2015)