Both Sides Now

January 29 — April 24, 2021

projects+gallery is pleased to announce Both Sides Now, a new exhibition taking place January 29 to April 24, 2021. The group exhibition features artworks that are evocative of our uniquely dichotomous moment, in which the simplest forms of intimacy are as elusive as inestimable existential concerns. Featured artists include El Anatsui, Donald Baechler, Louise Bourgeois, Michael Byron, Louis Cameron, John Rogers Cox, Barbara Crane, Tom Friedman, Richard Hughes, Terence Koh, Ben McLaughlin, Marilyn Minter, Sierra Pecheur, Julian Schnabel, Louis Stettner, Chloe West and Kehinde Wiley.

In a 1996 interview with the LA Times, Joni Mitchell recounted that she was compelled to write what might be quantified as the celebrated singer-songwriter’s nearest thing to a hit – “Both Sides Now,” from her 1969 album Clouds – while flying in an airplane and reading Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. An early passage in the novel describes how the protagonist is also in flight, observing clouds outside the passenger window. “I put down the book,” she said, “looked out the window and saw clouds too….” This moment of simultaneity – of seeing oneself reflected in something at once clearly at hand and inscrutably distant – anchors the arc of Mitchell’s remarkable song. Tracing the speaker’s revelatory journey from accepting experience as plainly evident to essentially dualistic – from not knowing clouds, to not knowing love, to ultimately not knowing life – “Both Sides Now” enacts a masterful reckoning with life’s fundamental ambiguity.

As our current moment finds us grappling with a necessarily amplified state of suspension between closeness and distance, disillusionment and hope, Mitchell’s song feels acutely resonant. The artworks assembled in this group exhibition therefore extend her lyrical premise by considering the dual nature of perspective and moving amidst the physical, the ineffably metaphysical and the spaces in-between.

A cloud materialized on canvas in Michael Byron’s Event in Brown Frame (2008) is juxtaposed with a photograph of Louise Bourgeois’s weathered hands hazarding a touch. The soft flutter of an eyelash is magnified in resounding stillness in Marilyn Minter’s photograph Misty (2001), which captures a corporeal moment otherwise so fleeting as to feel unreal. Adjacently, Donald Baechler’s Single Flower (2008) – a loose and childlike representation of a flower heavily fleshed in bronze – distills into form nostalgia’s fraught dilemma.

Vacillating between the intangible and the tactile, the aspirational and the mundane, the works that comprise Both Sides Now punctuate the ontological ambivalence of our current predicament by proposing to dwell in the remotely sharable (such as a song) and the cloudier realms of not-knowing.