The Naming of Parts (part one)

Group exhibition featuring works by Ben Coleman, Lewis Davidson, Michal Raz, Inbal Strauss and David Watson.
Triangle Gallery
2025
(curator)

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Like peering through a microscope, the works in The Naming of Parts exhibition expose the parts from which they are formed. Sculptures made from found objects create new wholes from the fusion of different parts; some are recognisable, others enigmatic, broken remnants of discarded things. Paintings and photographs examine how varied assemblies of the same elements and colors create different entities. Together, the artists playfully and curiously investigate new possibilities of shapes and structures by disassembling and reassembling. They offer fragments of the familiar, reconfigured in ways that are uncanny, obscene, whimsical, comical, or poetic.

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When toddlers learn to speak, they point at someone or something and name them. This act of naming continues throughout our lives. By naming, we identify, process information, and give meaning to our surroundings. Naming is both an act of discovery and an attempt at control. We name every plant, species, atom, molecule, and chemical; classify and delimit it. We name the whole and each part that constitutes it.

However, naming can also mislead us, keeping us tethered to the familiar. We try to understand the world using the names we already know, perhaps hesitant to step into the unfamiliar, the unrecognisable, the unnamed. For example, when early Enlightenment scientists saw previously invisible microorganisms through their microscopes, they described them in familiar forms. Appendages were mistaken for limbs, tails, or penises; orifices for mouths, vaginas, or anuses; segments for heads or torsos. Using familiar names and labels, we imposed an illusory control on a world of unpredictable forces. We continue to work within the existing framework, rearranging the same named pieces of the puzzle in new combinations, yet still confined by what we already recognise.

Using abstract and organic forms or synthetic, mass-produced materials, the works in the exhibition explore the tension between the parts and the whole, the classifiable and the unclassifiable, and the useless and the useful. They reflect on the significance of the fragment versus the entirety, both within the artwork itself and as a way of understanding our surroundings. The merging of the different parts creates a sense of multiple interpretations and associations. The exhibition invites the viewer to wander between the familiar and the obscure, to revel in misreading and misclassification.

Like toddlers pointing and naming what they see—often mistaking and confusing one thing for another—the exhibition aspires to rethink the fragments that constitute our reality, to play with them, and perhaps to create new ways of understanding wholes by (re)naming their parts.