lovers, lovers, lovers of the land
Katie Shlon
December 2, 2023 - January 14, 2024
BASEMENT is honored to host lovers, lovers, lovers of the land, by Katie Shlon, the second resident of our Radicle Residency. Shlon’s exhibition consists of a series of invitation-only programs that welcome her community members to engage in conversation, ceremony, music, storytelling, and solidarity with one another. These gatherings take place among drawings, poetry, and sculpture made by the artist over the course of their residency, in response to diasporic history and Palestinian liberation. As a gesture of care, the artist has chosen for these programs to be private and create space — for those who share her history and experience — to meet in intimacy, solidarity and mutual understanding. Gathering in Shlon’s practice and exhibition becomes a political act of both attentive refusal and deep care. Please take a moment to read Shlon’s statement on this work below.
Katie Shlon
Katie Shlon is an Arab++ artist currently living in Carrboro, NC. She has been the recipient of a public art commission from the city of Boulder, Colorado; Rubys Artist Project Grant from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Association; and a Saari Residency Fellowship through the KONE Foundation Finland. Shlon has shown works on top of mountains, in backyards, collaboratively at School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, Maryland; Little Berlin in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Good Press Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland; and Titanik in Turku, Finland. Recent solo exhibitions include peace seeker at Shed Space in Baltimore, Maryland in 2021 and sounds from the base of a mountain at Current Space in Baltimore, Maryland in 2020.
Artist’s Statement:
Katie Shlon is interested in our intimate and complex relationships with land. In lovers, lovers, lovers of the land, the artist asks viewers to contemplate the cultural and collective implications of a history of land dispossession, violent colonization, and reality of resistance in the Levant through an exhibition of drawings, poems, and sculpture. In the introduction to Contemporary Arab Thought, editor Elizabeth Kassab writes: “How can one re-create a living relationship with one's history and heritage after one has been estranged from them by colonial alienation?… Who is to decide and on what basis?” In this fraught condition of identity, the act of collective remembering becomes the path forward.
The entry into the gallery serves as a sitting room, conceptually grounded by reproductions of a pair of Bronze Age Levantine idols made by the artist and seen in the main gallery space. The historical idols, which were sold at a UK auction house for $548 and have now been rendered touch-less by the tyranny of collection, are speculated to be a sign of welcome and hospitality. The viewer is encouraged to reclaim the offering of the idol as a source of power held in the exhibition. The sitting room is activated by community gatherings where guests are invited to bring rugs, pillows, and other tangible comforts and enjoy tea, sweets, stories, traditional music, and crafts together. In the absence of community, the sitting room is notably empty awaiting its next gathering.
The main gallery space is framed by minimal drawings, text-based works on paper, and sculptural gestures. Suggesting the power of absence as presence, the gaps left in the work serve as a catalyst for communal activations in the adjoining sitting room. In contemplating the absence of the original work among the presence of drawings, poetry, and a built environment, this exhibition examines issues of colonization and displacement as well as care and community.
Both the exhibition and sitting room are open by invitation only.