OHAN BREIDING
OHAN BREIDINGSOUVENIR
Ochi Projects is pleased to present Souvenir, a solo exhibition of works by Ohan Breiding.
The exhibition is on view from May 4 – June 1, 2019 with an opening reception Saturday, May 4 from 6-9pm.
it all starts with the water.
i tell you this on the eve of your birthday while you suck, your body big now, and we, the only two things in the whole of the dark night. and it is true, water is where it starts. on the sofa, watching the movie with the fish and water comes like a trickle then a river then a wave and it streams and does not stop and the water comes from me…
and who can sing for loss and how much loss to make a life and how can you lose when every mère-sized hole in the universe leaves a space for something else to come in like a cat on a wooden box in the midst of a great wave and this i dredge up from the deep: the cells of siblings are in the mother long after they leave her body (we are each other) so the baby at home asleep on a sunday is singing through me scribbling in this concert hall and that is it: it starts with water and there is a second movement.
a second movement not like the mother not like the first and she is beautiful in the video Johanna made and tall and lean and loved and praised and the ghost of her haunts and lives in the features of my friend and the second movement is nothing like the first and it too is love and cradle and sound and it’s like Rilke says it’s like loss, and cruel as it may be, it does nothing against possession, it completes it, a second movement––he calls it acquisition––nothing like the first, “this time wholly internal and equally intense.”
and that night i did not know how far i’d die so you could come. and you follow the cat on the wooden box and her eyes tell you that you will climb out of this water and, too, that it will never let you go, for you have been marked by the waves and marked by my waters, and you will live in the story and the sound again and again––the swell––and how to end and who to tell and how to know except to live and loss and lust and roam, and try to breathe in water.
and try to breathe in water.
and when i listen all i hear is all that is unsaid.
and all that is unsaid lives in the pauses and the silence and the ums we edit out. and in the things we carry up and that are wrested from the deep, like waking up in water with no thing that you take home but your feet are bare and open, palm the floor boards
with your soles, and you will not be the same but you will ride the waves again. and again. because you still have more to ride and still have further out to swim.
Litia Perta
April 2019
Ohan Breiding works in photography, drawing, video, and collaboration to represent subjects that are marked deviant or illegible, and to experiment with forms of world-making that offer an alternative to state- sanctioned legitimation. Breiding attended Scripps College, the Glasgow School of Art and received her Masters from CalArts. They have exhibited work at art venues and museums including Photo LA (Los Angeles), LAXART (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Elga Wimmer Gallery (New York), the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) and the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland). They are a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Originally from a small village in Switzerland, Ohan Breiding currently lives and works in Los Angeles where they has been teaching at SFAI, CalArts and Scripps College over the past few years.
EXHIBITION WALK THROUGH
WITH OHAN BREIDING & JENNIFER MOON
SATURDAY, JUNE 1ST, 12PM
Jennifer Moon is an interdisciplinary life-artist whose work investigates organizing systems (social systems, institutional structures, power relations, scientific theories, emotional frameworks, etc.) and how these various systems are entangled, inscribed, transmitted, performed, and perpetuated through bodies (human, nonhuman, material, immaterial). Playfully pushing unlikely configurations—a book of Moon’s obsessive crushes in the style of Dungeon & Dragons Monster Manual; approaching the topic of incest with their family in a virtual world; repurposing Disney songs to inspire revolution—Moon’s work mobilizes potential to reconfigure our relationship to power, to reignite the social and political imaginaries, and to stimulate change beyond binaries, hierarchies, and capital.
