Lay, Weight

Lay, Weight

Phoebe Grip

March 4 - May 21, 2017

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to announce Lay, Weight, new work by Phoebe Grip in The Skirt, our dedicated space for site-specific installations. Grip’s hand-woven trap installation explores predation, gender, and space. The opening for this exhibition will run concurrently with Vika Lomasko’s Unwanted Women, a solo exhibition curated by Leeza Meksin and Bela Shayevich.

Phoebe Grip’s snares and nets are metaphysical traps which borrow the ancient form of a simple handmade snare to explore the dynamics of predator and prey.  Lay, Weight questions the universal sense of sehnsucht: a vague and nagging desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist. Nonfunctional and feminine, these snare traps are designed for an impossible and imagined prey; traps for a desire that is a persistent absence.

The variety of materials - including horsehair, monofilament, fish scales, wire and shells - play with space and line quality while working with a variety of depths through texture, reflection and obfuscation. Embodying the form of a trap, they intend to draw you in like a lure: shiny, beautiful, but threatening. In woven trap systems that are feminine, messy, shiny and seductive, Grip explores an implied gender narrative through predation while questioning how we augment and distort our world.

Phoebe Grip lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Grip has most recently exhibited at BRIC House for the 2016 Biennial, Re: Art Show in the Pfizer building, and the Wassaic Project’s Summer exhibition Appetite for Destruction. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, The Lehrman Trust at Soaring Gardens, and The Wassaic Project. Grip has a BA in English from Colorado College.