Soft Opening is pleased to be hosting LambdaLambdaLambda as part of Condo London 2024.
The group-exhibition PORTALS unites artworks that beckon us to traverse from one reality to another, whether through a vortex, door, aperture, hole, mirror, or other means. Portals delineate thresholds and liminality, introducing fresh possibilities for existence not solely tied to spiritual encounters but also emerging through the very experience of artworks, thereby influencing our perception of contemporary life.
Contemplating portals evokes awareness of an implied barrier, often establishing a distinction between inside and outside, laden with connotations like known/unknown or sacred/profane. Heinz Frank and Vedran Kopljar’s works reveal diverse relationships between inside and outside, challenging these distinctions. Portals have existed in the natural world, concentrated where magnetic energy converges—river banks, waterfalls, caves, trees, and mountain summits. Hunter Longe’s sculptures, resembling ancient formations with embedded lights, transport us to unimaginably distant pasts. Human behavior can also bring forth portals; places tied to intense emotions or experiences create a vortex or magnetic pull. This vortex, often symbolized as a spiral vacuum, opens into subtler dimensions beyond the space-time continuum. Emile Rubino, Sharona Franklin, and Dardan Zhegrova explore various facets of this phenomenon in their works.
Mirrors operate psychodynamically as portals, revealing internal realities that mirror external surroundings. They grant access to aspects otherwise unreachable, like one’s own reflection. The resulting images mimic and jest at the viewer’s self and immediate context, sharing similarities and disparities with what they aim to reflect which becomes apparent in Hanne Lippard’s works on view.