Basement Secrets: Cinema Supply’s “Lost and Found”
Installation view of Lost and Found, courtesy Cinema Supply, New York.
Slotted between thick industrial columns and rusted metal railings, the artworks of Lost and Found shine like gemstones in a rocky façade. Curator Aishan Zhang has brought together six young and exciting contemporary artists for a group exhibition in the basement of Cinema Supply, a creative co-working space in Chelsea, Manhattan. Artists Anoushka Bhalla, Wen-You Cai, Benny Or, Roxane Revon, Nicolas Tovar, and Chengtao Yi have each contributed a piece of themselves to the space, in an exhibition that centers on vulnerability, family history, and memory.
Cinema Supply takes its name from its predecessor, Star Cinema Supply, a large-scale cinema equipment supplier that operated out of the space during the ’70s and ’80s. In the ’90s, the building became home to several artists and creatives, most notably Wolf Kahn. Although this three-story building has been heavily refurbished in recent decades, care was given to the preservation and rehabilitation of the original architecture and materials. Today, Cinema Supply provides workspaces for artists, architects, and businesses—a multifaceted community that honors the building’s creative past.
One of the quirkiest elements preserved from the original building is a hand-operated freight elevator, which serves as the official entrance to the Lost and Found exhibition. As you reach the basement where the gallery is located, the doors roll open vertically, something like a curtain rising. Throughout the space, the artwork is hung at unconventional heights and intervals. The viewer is forced to swerve and explore, never able to see everything at once. Zhang shared that this inconvenience was intentional; the viewer is meant to feel like a transgressor, like they’ve entered a private and vulnerable space.
The pieces reflect this same sensation, and are both soul-baring and captivating. The exhibition includes two pieces by visual artist Nicolas Tovar: large-scale multi-media works that employ silkscreen, diffused dye, resin, and acrylic. The larger piece, Deux Mille Vingt Trois, is a frantic collage of image and text. At the center is a self-portrait photo of the artist, framed by a classic yellow cab and other indecipherable shapes. The top of the canvas is scratched with lines of handwritten text. Deux Mille Vingt Trois is something between a postcard and a monument to memory.
Nicolas Tovar, Rome (Emerging Series), 2015, Diffused dye, sand, silkscreen, diptych: 24 x 70” + 24 x 70”. Courtesy the artist and Cinema Supply, New York.
Tovar’s second piece, Rome (Emerging Series), holds history in its very surface. The image depicts a sun-washed street in Rome, the city where Tovar was living at the time. The image is warped in wavy ripple-like patterns. When I asked about the unique texture, Zhang informed me that Tovar’s roommate would blast music so loud that the sound waves physically warped the dye. Not only does Rome (Emerging Series) represent a period of time, it has been materially changed by its own circumstance.
Chengtao Yi, TV, 2021, Lenticular prints on wood, 20 x 20 x 20”; Chengtao Yi, Chair, 2021, Lenticular prints on wood, 23 x 43 x 23”; Chengtao Yi, Melon, 2021, Lenticular prints on wood, 20 x 20 x 30”. Courtesy the artist and Cinema Supply, New York.
More opaque but equally fascinating is the work of Chengtao Yi, an interdisciplinary artist who combines sculpture and lenticular printing to create 3D renderings of everyday objects. The central piece is the image of a simple wooden chair, printed onto a 3D block which silhouettes the chair’s shape. It harkens at once to Duchamp’s Fountain, mimicking a ready-made while simultaneously being the product of labor-intensive artistic production. Yi is interested in the idea of artificial objects, exploring consumption and dysfunction. The work challenges reality in the sense that it both resembles and operates exactly as the chair it emulates would, and yet, it is a completely novel object.
The closing work of the show, and perhaps the most emotionally visceral, is Wen-You Cai’s photobook Minnan Exit (2024). The work, titled after the phrase “Irish exit,” investigates rituals and celebrations of death in Cai’s own Minnan culture. Realizing that almost all of her trips to her parents’ hometown of Quanzhou, Fuijan, were for funerals, Cai decided to document this experience in a series of photos and interviews. The result is a powerfully moving story that details the elaborate process of a Minnan funeral. Cai’s work takes us with her into a memory and asks us to confront the thorniest edges of grief, ritual, and mortality.
Lost and Found curated by Aishan Zhang is on view at 217 W 21st Street from May 25th to July 27th, 2024. It is viewable by appointment only, or through membership to Cinema Supply.
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