SUPERSEED

Hannah Antalek
On view: November 11 - December 24
Opening Reception: November 11, 4 - 7pm

5-50 Gallery is proud to present SUPERSEED, a solo show featuring all new paintings by Hannah Antalek. Known for her drawings, the artist recently reintroduced painting to her artistic practice. Antalek’s work explores imaginary landscapes, while serving as a reminder of the impending climate crisis and humanity’s role in the destruction of nature. The show will be on view from November 11th through December 24th, with an opening reception on the 11th of November, 4-7pm. 

In SUPERSEED, Antalek paintings depict the hypothetical evolution of plant and fungal forms into sentient anthropomorphized “daisy dupes” in light of a world inextricably altered by human intervention. These paintings imagine new botanical and mycological life. Here, self-sustaining biological processes inherited in response to our attempts to geoengineer the environment, have created a replication of a life form that is familiar, but not immediately recognizable. 

The large painting Seminal Landing envisions the first landfall of crystalline stratospheric aerosol injection, a proposed method of solar geoengineering that would induce global dimming by inoculating the stratosphere with pulverized diamonds. In theory the diamonds would increase the albedo of the atmosphere and cool the planet by reflecting the sun away from earth. In Seminal Landing, a clearing of daisy dupes are seen in a cluster of barren trees. Fallen crystalline structures attempt to cling and graft to branches but are subsequently melted by an internal heat source emanating from the daisy dupes. The molten fluids drip languidly from the branches in an interstitial moment of pause before another stage of transformation - perhaps into a new daisy dupe as seen in Final Form where an engorged flower head erupts from a crystalline shell. 

Edging calls to attention the manner in which these speculative scenarios are created. Each painting in the exhibition is first realized as a three dimensional diorama model crafted from homemade clay, compostable and recyclable materials like paper mache, cardboard, and paper, and utilizes non-recyclable discarded refuse like styrofoam and plastic film as armature for new creations. With each new diorama, elements of previous scenes are repurposed so that each new artwork has a relationship to the last, creating an immersive and expansive alternative world. The observable dimensionality of each scene allows the final paintings to have an equal sense of believability. The act of translating something miniature into something human-scale gives a slightly off-kilter uncanniness to the final image and Edging disrupts the illusion of the imagined scene, revealing the edge of the diorama at the base of this painting.

While fluidity of form is seen in works such as Edging, Apocrine II, Gush, and Perpetual Aurora, Carbon Capture, Saltmaker, and Halobate depict a more solid state of transformation. Though surrounded in a vaporous environment that displaces the idea of both gravity and horizon, these daisy dupes display a hardened shell-like exterior studded with protective thorns, sequestering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, capturing it and turning it into hardened stone.

Through the language of the fantastic, SUPERSEED calls attention to our increased alienation from nature. It imagines the haunted, yet beautiful and luminescent results of the apathetic actions that are speeding us towards environmental collapse. Mysteriously backlit in vivid tones, each color cast is evocative of an unknown light source that might insinuate the presence of a second sun, a foreign moon, the heat or chill of a nearby chemical glow. The phorphorescent glimmer insinuates less a post-apocalyptic future than the promise of the capacity for adaptation and resilience across all life forms. Yet as human beings, the exhibition asks an important question: will there be an ultimate reciprocity amongst humans and nature, or will one take the place of the other?

Hannah Antalek is an artist living in Queens, NY and working in Brooklyn, NY. In 2013 she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in painting, and continued her education through the New York City Crit Club. 5-50 Gallery has included her work in multiple exhibitions, including a two-person show at Future Fair 2022 and at the recent edition of the Spring/Break Art Fair, September 2023. Other recent (group)exhibitions include High Stakes, presented by Lisa Boudet (Paris), Romantic Radiations at The Yard (Brooklyn, NY), Brief Encounters presented by Good Naked Gallery at The Java Project (Brooklyn, NY), and Exhibitionist at House of X (New York, NY). Her works have also been featured at SPRING/BREAK 2020 and 2021, and, with 5-50 Gallery, at Future Fair’s Holiday Market 2021 and 2022. Hannah Antalek has received multiple awards, including the New Work Grant from the Queens Art Fund in 2023, the Manhattan Graphics Center Scholarship (2019), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2016), among others. She was involved in several artist-run projects as While Supplies Last, The Drawing Exchange, and Flat Rate Contemporary.