Giulia Cenci, secondary forest, 2024
On view April 10, 2024–March 2025
On the High Line at 24th Street
Giulia Cenci (b. 1988, Cortona, Italy) presents secondary forest, composed of animal, human, and plant forms cast from aluminum, sprouting out from a steel grid armature. Dismembered wolf heads sit atop bundles of branches that seemingly stand in for their bodies, and cast tree roots hover above the ground. Masks of human faces, their eyes squeezed shut, peek between branches, upside down and sideways. This amalgamation of organic and industrial materials reflects the history of the Meatpacking District's meat trade and the High Line's former role as an industrial conveyor. Cenci also reflects on the blurred line between humans and all other forms of life.
Tschabalala Self, Patience, 2022
Loosie in the Park, 2019
On view April–July 31 2024
Adjacent to the park at Dyer Ave and 30th Street
Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, New York, New York) reproduces Patience (2022) and Loosie in the Park (2019) on the High Line–Moynihan Connector Billboard. Patience depicts a Black female figure, within a flat yellow interior. The work explores the psychological significance of the home, domesticity, and gendered labor. Loosie in the Park portrays a female figure in a moment of leisure, sitting on a park bench smoking a "loosie"—a single cigarette sold at neighborhood bodegas. Both works navigate the intersection of identity and cultural and societal expectations, together presenting a commentary on the contemporary Black woman’s experience.
Teresa Solar-Abboud, Birth of Islands, 2024
On view May 2024–March 2025
On the High Line at 20th Street
Teresa Solar-Abboud (b. 1985, Madrid, Spain) presents Birth of Islands, a new sculpture in her series of zoomorphic shapes inspired by animals and prehistoric life forms. Birth of Islands is composed of slick, blade-like foam-coated resin elements that emanate outward from the pores of a muddy, gray ceramic stump. When visiting New York, Solar-Abboud was struck by the landscape—building after building, rising from the soil in a fight for prominence, just as vegetation in the forest combats for sunlight in order to survive. Birth of Islands refers to this competitive ecosystem, while also evoking human anatomy: two yellow, tongue-like emanations have seemingly tunneled their way from underground onto the High Line. The result appears simultaneously post-human and primordial; sophisticated and elementary—a representation of our own unending transformation alongside nature’s ever-evolving state.
Tishan Hsu, car-grass-screen-2 and car-body-screen-2, 2024
On view May 2024–April 2025
On the High Line at Little West 12th Street
Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston, Massachusetts) presents car-grass-screen-2 and car-body-screen-2, two biomorphic forms constructed out of resin-wrapped foam. The cars’ shapes, with their soft edges and curved surfaces, appear entirely organic but for their glitching, screen-like skins. The sculptures hover above the ground in a space of endless possibility, where the hybrid body could be anywhere and anything, like the cars, devices, and virtual worlds that we increasingly inhabit and surround ourselves with. Hsu’s work blurs the line between our physical bodies and technological interfaces, suggesting a new way in which we experience ourselves and the world around us.
Chloe Wise, But Wait, There’s More!
On view May 7–July 8, 2024
Screening evenings beginning at dusk
On the High Line in the 14th Street Passage
Chloe Wise’s (b. 1990, Montreal, Canada) short film exhibition But Wait, There’s More!, replicates the sensation of channel surfing at the mercy of some unknown remote control holder. Told a Vision (2023) features fragments of commercials with uncanny similarities to those found on cable television, though the audience is never able to grasp what exactly is being sold. In addition, Wise will premiere two new films that continue in this vein for the High Line’s exhibition. Wise’s films presents a poignant critique on postmodern consumer culture, and the fallacy that consumption can provide fulfillment or happiness.
