Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery will host the first North America solo exhibition for European artist collective Troika. Titled “Cartography of Control,” the show is inspired by the increasingly rational and scientific precepts that seem to govern society. Through a series of sculptures, drawings, and installations, Troika hopes to challenge the idea that there is only one way to interpret human experience.
Just as different cartographers will create maps that depict the same area in different ways, Troika argues that the truth of our material world can be represented in any number of ways. The collective has created a series of geometric and mathematically-influenced works that ultimately reflect the random chaos and unpredictable nature of human experience.
Incorporating light, water, and electricity, these artworks explore the notion of control, and how much influence man is capable of exerting over the natural world. Despite our tendency to impose systematic order on our surroundings, Troika argues, there is an inherent conflict between such deliberate planning and and the unpredictable, random, spontaneous nature of the universe. They have demonstrated the futility of this effort through such works as the suspended rotating sculpture Sum of all Possibilities, a sphere made up of multiple pieces hanging in an ever-shifting arrangement; and the show’s namesake “Cartography of Control,” a series of drawings created through the manipulation of electric shocks.
The members of Troika, founded in 2003, are French artist Sebastien Noel and German artists Eva Rucki and Conny Freyer. Their work has appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2008, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2009, Tate Britain in 2007, and earlier this year in the Unlimited section at Art Basel. This past spring, Kohn Gallery moved to a newly-designed building in Hollywood (see “Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery Moving to New Space in Hollywood“).
Troika’s first North American solo exhibition, “Cartography of Control,” is on view at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, January 10–February 7, 2015.