Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Bleeding
September 6 - October 12, 2024
Jenny Wu, 10 Exhibitions to See in September 2024, ArtReview
How You’re Supposed to Be - Sylvie Hayes Wallace in Conversation with Margaret Kross, Flash Art
Artforum Must See
Silke Lindner is pleased to present Bleeding, Sylvie Hayes-Wallace’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Mapping out interior and outer existence, Hayes-Wallace’s sculptural practice explores the confinements of the self in its thoughts, feelings, and the body as a barrier between the inner self and exterior world. Guided by the measurements of her own body, her sculptures are composed of wire and glass cages that incorporate an ever-evolving personal archive of markers of time.
The exhibition is comprised of three types of sculpture: a large scale cage of 108 square feet of wire fencing, installed like a tapestry and based on the surface area of skin on the artist’s body, a freestanding glass cage with a light inside, mirroring the proportions of her body in space, and a series of seven cages based on the dimensions of the artist’s head.
Referring to the number of days in a week, the series of head cages is set within temporal parameters that combine cycles of physical, emotional, and economic pressures of existing. A black cage titled Depression, a pink one My Power, and a red one Bleeding – bluntly disclose shifting psychological states of angst, rebellion, or sadness. Like blood that oozes through the barriers of the skin, the long lists of materials embedded into each of the wire fencing and glass cages reveal the artist’s interior world. The cage Bleeding, for instance, contains: floss, lace, old Madonna tank top, Zoe B radio show January 18 2022 playlist “new consciousness”, Italian underwear, bloodstained mattress protector, 2022 physical therapy prescription, UBS Annual report, psychoanalysis payment receipt, pad wrapper, and waterlogged Capital One credit score disclosure notice - among others. Collected and archived throughout different periods of her life, the snippets read like multi-angled snapshots from various times that create a complex and abstract self-portrait.
Referencing psychological, architectural, and urban confinement, the cages mimic spaces of shelter, and feelings of privacy and interiority. In Her Private Property, a freestanding glass cage the size of Hayes-Wallace’s body is lined with printouts of a waterlogged ‘how to be confident’ Wikihow listicle, privacy envelopes, ‘how to be a bitch’ listicle pages, privacy film for windows, and her mother’s scarf from going through chemotherapy. Illuminated with a light from the inside, moments of information reveal themselves to the viewer while others remain obscure. Playing with the visibility and reversibility of information and of sculpture, Hayes-Wallace explores the boundaries of private and public.
Through the dense accumulation of information and material used in the sculptures, Hayes-Wallace attempts to understand and organize a disarrayed life. Stylistically close to the personalized maximalist aesthetic ‘cluttercore’, inspired by the messiness of teenage rooms, the sharp wire structures contain a heap of information and materials that seep through their entrapments. By collecting, categorizing, archiving, and assembling, Hayes-Wallace takes inventory of the self and counters feelings of invisibility by reaffirming her existence in space.
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace (b. 1994, Cincinnati, Ohio) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York (2024); In Extenso, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2023); A.D. Gallery, New York (2022); Bad Water, Knoxville (2022); Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2021); and New Works, Chicago (2019); among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Rose Easton, London (2024); Cob Gallery, London (2024); Chapter NY, New York (2023); Simone Subal Gallery, New York (2022); King’s Leap, New York (2021) and Frontera 115, Mexico City (2018); among others.