Present Company closes out the year with the two-person exhibition ROA::TILLMAN, opening on December 14th from 7-11pm. Titled after NY-based artists Ryan Roa and Trish Tillman, the work of both artists straddles the tension between the personal and built environment in order to construct a vocabulary of semiotic sculptures and installations.

Roa’s interventions confront the nature of edifice and the essence of gravity. By employing the structural elements and surfaces of a space, Roa utilizes otherwise static architecture as a fulcrum point of leverage and compression in a manner that exposes the kinetic forces inherent in his three-dimensional markings. By establishing mathematical systems of arrangement, Roa’s pieces engage the viewer into a calculated relationship with the range and ratio of their surrounding space.

Tillman utilizes furniture, fashion and interior design elements in order to explicate traces of mythology and mysticism from a number of indigenous influences. These compositions occur as talismans, which serve to mirror the artist’s own insights into natural and supernatural phenomena. Tillman’s architecture is internal, illuminating the inherent conflicts of the psychic temple as it has been constructed and contemplated in various forms throughout human history.

Via their distinct processes, Roa and Tillman repurpose unconventional, readymade materials to advance unique interventions that provoke temporal and spiritual contemplation. Familiarity is breached. Equilibrium is disrupted. By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters… —The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sect. II, Mem. IV.