Kim Faler
Something that Feels like Truth
Full Press Release
Something that Feels like Truth explores the anxiety and doubt that fog our daily experience, through painting, photography, and sculpture. The work comes from my interest in how humans hold, lift, and bend ourselves into something we believe to be true, all the while, questioning if and how long the legs of these ideas will hold.
My work always begins with the productive act of thinking through process and material. Much like a personal journal, I begin with what I know, and then attempt to unravel the emotion that sits below the surface. Similarly, I deconstruct the idea and structure of a painting, breaking it down to its elemental parts – stretcher bars, canvas, gesture, image, and object. This dissection allows me to investigate materiality while also engaging in the dialogue about how uncertainty creeps in when you see the parts aside from the whole.
Within this larger series is a group of photographs titled Almost/Nearly,which considers the intimacy of our own hands – magnifying every line or spec of dirt. This close inspection, allows us to question how time both creates and alters what we think we know, revealing the depth below the surface. Extending this notion, the work Cull explores the notion of touch. The term ‘”cull” refers to the editing or omission of flawed works from a larger selection. And the work does just that, by revealing what my own hands have left and rejected through the process of making the work.
The final work in this series, Nope and Superchunk, focus on the marriage of tension and fragility, as is evident in all the works that comprise Something That Feels Like Truth. Nope depicts a cast-iron banana is propped-up with makeshift wooden scaffolding. This support hopelessly arranges the discarded banana peel in place, made even more absurd by the longevity of the material counter to its organic source. Superchunk also makes concrete the ephemeral, through the form of a cast-gypsum portrait of an enlarge wad of bubblegum that hangs from the ceiling. Anxiety and tension are imbued within the bubblegum form – like you can almost feel your jaw nervously chewing away. Yet the piece, which is head-sized hovers at eye level bringing us face to face with its material nature.
In the end, this group of works, reminds us of ourselves – our hands, the discards of our lives from banana peels to chewed bubble gum. Together the works reinforce how we cobble ourselves and our worlds together in a delicate balance of material, idea, and sheer stamina to keep going.