Galerie Kandlhofer curated by DJ Hellerman
„Shored Against My Ruins“

DJ Hellerman is the Deputy Director & Senior Curator at moCa Cleveland where he is responsible for setting and implementing moCa's curatorial vision. He is charged with bringing moCa's mission and vision to life through strategic and collaborative partnerships. Formerly, DJ served as the Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Fabric Workshop & Museum in Philadelphia where he led the research and execution of artist-centered projects, exhibitions, and programming. Focused on helping ideas find material form through the foundational elements of collaboration, experimentation, and process over product, DJ is committed to building relationships based on trust, effective communication, and vulnerability to allow for the openness and intimacy essential for creating meaningful work. Working with artists across context-sensitive, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary projects, DJ focuses on artistic process; the relationship between art, technology, and spirituality; place-based art making; early use of video as an art form; and the development of alternative cultural institutions. Recent exhibitions include Harminder Judge: Bootstrap Paradox; Soft/Cover; Henry Taylor: Nothing Change, Nothing Strange; Jayson Musson: His History of Art; Doreen Lynette Garner: Pale In Comparison; Ira Lombardia: VOID; YOKO ONO: REMEMBERING THE FUTURE; Strata: Frank Gillette and Suzanne Anker co-curated with David Ross; Jeff Donaldson: Dig; Vanessa German: de.structive dis.tillation; Adam Milner: Late Night Space Force; Edie Fake: Structures Shift; TR Ericsson: I Was Born To Bring You Into This World; Björn Schülke: Traveling Spy; and Mildred Beltré: DreamWork.

Fragmentation is ultimately an illusion. It is a ruse, a mirage that makes itself known through the melancholy and the euphoric, as life separates and splinters. Sometimes the stuff of daily life–a moonrise, an unassuming meal, an unyielding lament, the folding of freshly laundered things–becomes a ritualized act from which we glimpse the sublime. Catching these tiny fleeting shards is everything, wholeness.

 

Shored Against My Ruins features work by seven artists who embrace loose ends, the indecipherable, and the untidy. Their work is deeply connected to the process of coming undone. With a distinct relationship to the physical and psychic archive, each artist tackles the notion of reassembling. Their work is built of personal and communal objects, memories, and autobiographical experiences reminding us to pay close attention to what we collect during our own process of endless reconstruction.

 

These images persist

They work on me

As I glean and gather

And work on them, too

For a new, or at least another