My Eye is a Mouth
Kalina Winters and Carl D’Alvia
May 10th - June 16th, 2024
Opening reception Friday, May 10th 6-9pm.
“My Eye is a Mouth,” is a collaborative exhibition from Carl D'Alvia and Kalina Winters that celebrates their shared inspirations and creative dialogue. The title is borrowed from a Dieter Roth lithograph-–one that Kalina bought during her initial deep-dive on the German iconoclast, inspired by Carl’s recommendation. Roth’s balance of the silly and the macabre has served to build an early bond of fascination for the two artists.
Between Carl’s sculpture and Kalina’s paintings, we see disparate modes of making converge with a sense of skewed whimsy and uncanny world-building. Embodied characters drawn from a foggy folk-pop lexicon dominate both artist’s work. Kalina’s paper-doll-like figures, and Carl’s overgrown critters seem to share an origin in the attic, or the thrift shop toy aisle. Our collective memory is easily endeared by the charm of misfit toys; these weird little guys feel almost alive. The asynchronous yields its own sweet harmony. But how sweet is this work, really? The familiarity hits immediately, but the longer we look, the less sure of what we’re really looking at. No answers emerge from prolonged gazing, just more tessellated connections between surface, depth, and form.
The rag-tag crew almost springs forth from the cartoon-shaped holes of Kalina’s canvases and lands with a dignified humor in Carl’s bronze sculptures. Kalina’s hypnotic palette hits like hard candy–-intense, long-lingering, and the least bit queasy. On the other hand, the patina on Carl’s work betrays their metallic weight with a certain resigned grimness, no matter how thick their fur or feathers may be. Where Kalina’s figures seeth in silhouette between fanciful patterns and brush-strokes, Carl’s creatures wear these textures as their own skin. It’s a full Hansel-and-Gretel experience.
As Carl and Kalina unveil their exhibition, they invite viewers to witness the alchemy of their creative partnership—a testament to the transformative power of shared inspiration and dialogue. In the spirit of the title, the exhibition shares the visual appetites and scopophilic tendencies of these two artists. Equally important, “My Eye Is A Mouth” shows how viewing becomes a kind of sustenance. Together Carl D’Alvia and Kalina Winters showcase the profound influence of collaboration on the artistic process, reaffirming the enduring legacy of creative kinship.
Kalina Winters lives and works in Queens, NY. She received a BA in 2018 from Rhode Island School of Design, and has been in many group shows such as at Harkawik, O'Flaherty's, The Museum of Museums in Seattle, Klaus von Nichtssagend, and Underdonk among others. This is her first 2 person show.
Carl D’Alvia received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 and splits his time between Connecticut and New York City. He works in a sculptural idiom that is decidedly hyper-visual, artisanal and history laden. He has developed proprietary sculptural processes that co-opt existing means of traditional and industrial production. Drawing on sources that include megalithic monuments, toy design and the Baroque, the work encapsulates seemingly antithetical motifs such as minimal/ornate, industrial/handmade, comic/tragic, progress/destruction and attraction/repulsion. He has had recent solo shows at Hesse Flatow in New York and Galerie Hussenot in Paris as well as previous solo shows at Nathalie Karg Gallery and Regina Rex in New York, Galerie Papillon, Mulherin + Pollard and Derek Eller Gallery. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at numerous galleries including: The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mother Gallery, Helena Anrather, Anton Kern Gallery, Jeff Bailey Gallery, The Hole, Regina Rex, The Journal Gallery, The Yerba Buena Art Center, The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Feature Inc., and White columns.
His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art, The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Boston Globe, Time Out and the Village Voice. He also taught sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and served as a guest lecturer and critic at the Rome Programs of the Rhode Island School of Design, Cornell, and Temple University. He was awarded the Rome Prize for Visual Arts for 2012-2013 from the American Academy in Rome.