https://www.heavengallery.com/work/strained-states
https://jamesonpaige.com/Strained-States-2019
Our state of being is always defined in relation to; it is ourselves, others, and how we are attached. We often think of attachments as good for us, objects and people that draw us in, desire and comfort us. However, attachments are just as often volatile, saddening, and end in consequence. They are the unrequited lover, the sick and diminishing parent—once provider, now in need—the stray cat we know but can’t get close to, the indifferent and nonhuman object. We can also consider our immaterial attachments—claimed or assigned signifiers. Notions of identity and how we appear in social and cultural space become ways of attaching to the world, even if we do not agree with how those attachments manifest. What comes to mind are the limits imposed by marginality, or the shameful feeling of an ill-fitting nationality.
Strained States is an exhibition that takes interest in an expanded reading of states of being, i.e. how we move through the world […] Elena Ailes explores how affect might be embodied through material in a subtle series of objects that sit between sculpture and drawing. Her contribution outlines the contours of the exhibition by pointing to the intensities between other artists’ works, where they rub each other’s edges, and how the gallery’s architecture itself pushes and pulls us toward certain sensations and states.
