NY Studio Gallery is pleased to present The Tiller Effect, curated by Emmy Mikelson. The title derives from an expression describing certain steering mechanisms that entail turning in the opposite direction of where you want to go – turn left to go right, turn right to go left. It is a counterintuitive movement that involves a rhythmic balance of contradiction.

The artists in the show are equally engaged with movements or gestures that disrupt an intuitive sense of balance. Form, material, and intention are explored as unstable states and presented at the threshold of disequilibrium. Balance is antithetically conceived of as a dynamic and fluctuating state. The work within the show is perpetually disrupting a rational Euclidean plane and advocating for a space in which the subject is constantly negotiating her/his environment.

Charlotte Becket’s kinetic sculptures move slowly – sometimes imperceptibly – as their looping, rhythmic motion transforms these motorized machines into figural abstractions or landscapes. Her recent work includes wall mounted geometric forms with black-mirrored surfaces. As the forms slowly shift and redirect light they become hallucinogenic and unstable.

Christian Maychack’s newest sculpture consists of a towering architecture of sorts, constructed from marbleized Magic-Sculpt, and grafted onto a living houseplant. The construction simultaneously constrains and redirects the growth of the plant, while becoming a necessary support. Maychack will add to and adjust the piece in response to the plant’s growth over the duration of the exhibition.

In Chad Mitchner’s to-scale installations of interior rooms there is the constant tension between familiar fictions and uncanny spaces. The work is an attempt at reconstructing memories while occluding their existence in the present tense. The resultant spaces are filled with a nostalgic amnesia where even the artist himself becomes a fictitious figure.

Kristine Moran’s hallucinogenic territories are fractured and distorted, yet balanced by the richness in palette, gesture and reference. With witty shifts that collapse time, space and sound, Moran plays up the inherent drama of painting, as passages of excess are contradicted by denial and withholding.

The two-panel print by Benjamin Tiven selects a passage from Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia and pairs it with the translation by a German immigrant living in the U.S. since 1943, roughly when the Adorno text was written. Both texts are designed according to the aesthetic principles of the German book designer Jan Tschichold, who turned to a humanist classicism after rejecting his pre-war commitments to radical, Bauhaus-inflected modernism.