sellthefarm — SARA'S

SELL THE FARM

LEO ELIA JUNG
RACHEL ROSHEGER

SEPTEMBER 8
OCTOBER 8 2023

Sara’s is pleased to present Sell The Farm, a dual exhibition of work by Leo Elia Jung and Rachel Rosheger. Located at 2 E Broadway Floor 3, New York, NY 10038, Sell The Farm will run from September 8th to October 8th 2023.

Sell The Farm brings together two bodies of work from Leo Elia Jung and Rachel Rosheger, sourced from a shared penchant for patents, attempts to harness natural forces, and the emotional alterities of scientific phenomena. The two draw on topics as diverse as HVAC systems, corrosive metals, and the ongoing scientific effort to revive the Woolly Mammoth in the Siberian steppe. In Jung’s plexiglass and wood sculptures and Rosheger’s series of silverpoint drawings and metal sculpture, such influences become a pointed visual poetics, both invigorated and vexed by the schemes and dreams of human civilization on the brink of collapse.

The very real and stranger-than-fiction attempt to revive the long extinct Woolly Mammoth is for Jung a point of artistic departure, in which the artist creates plaques for a natural history museum which does not yet exist. Etched into plexiglass, the body of the neo-Mammoth is parsed in a didactic rendering. Transporting the viewer to the near future, the artist presents a world of profanation, in which fantastical occurrences are remade by mundane, institutional confines. Where some of today’s scientists conjecture the return of the Woolly Mammoth could preserve the health of threatened arctic ecosystems, Jung steps into this temporal gordian knot to expose the ideological currents which animate such an undertaking.

A mechanical rooster appears ghostlike. Drawn by Rosheger with silverpoint, a drafting tool made from the most conductive element, the image appears like a windswept remain, destined over time to oxidize—as silverpoint does—the marks ultimately deepening with tonal density. A pressure reader juts from the rooster’s backside, it’s beak ajar as if mid-scream. As invested in everyday mechanisms like HVAC ventilation systems and pressure gauges as she is with the manic realm of perpetual motion machines, the artist sets out to make visible processes which are usually felt but unseen to the naked eye. For Rosheger, pressurized air is seen in its simultaneity—both in a mundane iteration, as air rattling in a ventilation system and as a manifestation of apocalyptic power—like in the Midwest’s tornado alley. Presenting a double vision, Rosheger’s barely-there subjects appear both frozen in perpetual motion and as the fossilized remains of a world that once was.

Taken together, these series create a conversant exhibition which exposes the last ditch efforts, whether scientific, psychological, or both, which have arisen to our present moment marked by environmental exigencies wrought by human civilization. Whether or not the answers to our problems will come from the ancient animal kingdom or from the machinations of mad scientists, for Rosheger and Jung one thing is certain: it is time to abandon all that is known, if only to make us realize it was never really there. Storm clouds are on the horizon; the breakthrough is imminent. The time has come to sell the farm.

Leo Elia Jung (b.1998) is an artist based between Hamburg and Berlin whose work is concerned with the intersection of science and temporality, spanning sculpture and installation. Jung’s writing has been published on Do Not Research and his work has been recently exhibited in exhibitions at Like a Little Disaster, Polignano a Mare, Italy; Lobe Block, Berlin; and Frappant, Hamburg. Jung previously studied in Berlin and is currently continuing his studies at HFBK. He is the recipient of the Ditze-Stiftung Grant, among others.

Rachel Rosheger (b. 1994) is an artist based in New York, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Gone Before You Get There at Microscope Gallery, New York (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Lower Cavity, Massachusetts (2023); Parent Company, New York (2023); Fragment Gallery, New York (2022); Harkawik, New York (2022); As it Stands, Los Angeles (2021); among others. She graduated from The Cooper Union in 2017 and is a recipient of the 2018 Benjamin Menschel Fellowship.

IMAGES AND INSTALLATION VIEWS