Someday, New York
Tom Forkin
For Art-O-Rama 2023, Someday is pleased to present work by Aline Bouvy, Tom Forkin, and Yi To.
Aline Bouvy’s multidisciplinary practice offers an ongoing critique of societal norms and health codes that constrain our bodies and suppress desire. Through her sculpture and installation, she confronts conventional standards that subliminally mold human behavior, challenging what society deems morally “dirty” or aesthetically “ugly.” In her ongoing “Urine Mate” series, Bouvy employs the marquetry technique on linoleum, utilizing a muted palette of black and grey, enriched by the textural complexity of speckled moiré. Subverting linoleum’s typical use as a floor covering, Bouvy opens up various interpretive paths concerning intimacy, patriarchy, and unbridled personhood. Low relief, plaster-cast stray dogs symbolize urban rebellion and reflect Bouvy’s innovative use of material and defiance of rigid categorization.
Tom Forkin works with a diverse array of media, manipulating the typical properties of his chosen materials to produce isolated vignettes. His sculptures often evoke the environmentally-harsh and socially-hostile Western cities that flourished through the 19th century. Locomotive models constructed from now-antiquated bar carts appear beside watercolors of kerosene streetlamps, toying with humanity’s penchant for nostalgia. His sculptures suggest narrative without providing any clear, linear resolve—each vignette defined by its withholding. In a new series of painted plaster reliefs, Forkin obsessively reimagines the familiar interior of van Gogh’s “Le Café de la nuit” (1888). Forkin removes the five figures from the original painting, focusing solely on the formal components—light and shadow, wood beams, and liquor bottles; the vertiginous distortion of perspective. The familiarity of the interior functions as a false reveal, misdirecting the viewer toward more subtle manipulations. Through this purposely parochial lens, Forkin demonstrates how slight shifts in color and texture can cause drastic changes in legibility and meaning.
Yi To works across painting and sculpture to produce divergent compositions. Forms shape- shift from paint and canvas to concrete and metal—both dense and vaporous; elucidating and cryptic. The use of marble dust and a restrained, earthy palette engenders worlds of archeology—carbon fossils and terrestrial bio-signatures; potsherds from antiquity; desert geoglyphs and limestone reliefs—while the recurrence of biomedical, technological, and celestial symbols stretches To’s fragmented narratives into both past and future. Sedimentary layers give way to a taut gossamer surface, raw and exposed like a body turned inside out to reveal a dramaturgy of cellular activity. The deliberate play of scale and perspective, likened to cut-and-fold theorems, offers a window into new dimensions and a complex understanding of history—both personal and collective.
Together, the works of Bouvy, Forkin, and To scrutinize societal norms, historical reflection, and human introspection. Each artist subverts legibility through their own unique methodologies, challenging the viewer to adopt multiple roles: interpreter, appraiser, critic, and voyeur. The rejection of societal norms, illusory nostalgia, and the obsession with linear time converge in a multifaceted dialogue on perception and distortion.
Aline Bouvy (b 1974 Brussels Belgium) lives and works between Brussels and Luxembourg. Bouvy graduated from the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands in 2001 and from the Ecole de Recherche Graphique, Brussels, Belgium in 1999. She has exhibited internationally at the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre Brussels; Galerie Albert Baronian; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Christopher Crescent Gallery, Brussels; Nosbaum & Reding Projects, Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Exo Exo, Paris, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France; IMT Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Roberta Pelan, Toronto, Canada, and Motel, Brooklyn NY. A major survey of Bouvy’s work was recently on view at the Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand— Honru (Brussels) from January – September 2022.
Tom Forkin (b. 1986 Cleveland OH; lives and works in Brooklyn NY) received a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Rutgers Mason Gross School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include The Electrician at Someday Gallery, New York, 2022; The Thoroughfare at LY, Los Angeles, 2019; Manhattan, Shoot The Lobster, New York, 2017; and Brooklyn, Motel, Brooklyn, 2017. Recent group exhibitions include; Survey at Bureau, New York, 2022; Group Show III, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River, MA; Heaven’s Tab, AD Gallery, New York, 2021; A Stolen Painting Found by a Tree, Rope, Baltimore; Will You, Pratt Institute Brooklyn, both 2016; Garden of Sadness, Violet’s Cafe Brooklyn, and Charmed, Shoot The Lobster New York, both 2015.
Yi To (b. Hong Kong, 1995) is a London-based artist who received her MA in painting from the Royal College of Art and her BA from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Select exhibitions include: DELI Gallery, CDMX, Mexico City (2023); Vacancy, Shanghai (2023); HIVE Contemporary, Beijing (2023); ArtCrush, The Aspen Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2021); MAMOTH, London (2021); Someday, New York (2021); Our Home, This Mortal Coil, Ione & Mann, Cromwell Place, London (2021), Asylum Chapel, London (2021) and Snapshot, Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Art, London (2020). To was a finalist for the 2021 Hopper Prize. Her first solo exhibition in New York was held at Someday in March of 2022.
https://www.somedaygallery.com
