DENK gallery is pleased to present recent works by French, Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Joséphine Wister Faure. Working across a variety of media to create and haunted encounters, Faure combines sculpture, installation, performance, and video to explore the poetics of personal and cultural gestures. Interested in the intimations of experience, she looks to propose the transitory and the unfixed in her practice, often incorporating living variables into her works like sound, time, interaction, and wind, to produce figurative phantoms and ghosts.

The exhibition will include Wister Faure's compelling installation, Bottled, created in collaboration with Matthieu Chedid in 2016. Using the idea of a bottle adrift at sea, and its implied contents of a message, Faure presents the object as a link to an implicit narrative. This concise though spectral installation presents a bottle delicately perched upon a simple darkened metal stand; a sound composition by Chedid accompanies the work. The component galvanizes the installation and activates the viewer's encounter with this object metaphor of the vessel, both empty and full. A phantasmal whistling, disembodied and omnipresent, fills the entire space with its tacit absence, while simultaneously inviting the closer inspection of its implied source: the bottle's opening. Poignantly vacant, the simple glass object becomes a symbolic proposition as both an open, communicative gesture and a closed confined container.

In another featured work, Time's Up (2019), Wister Faure creates a sculpture of three forearms, like classical statuary ruins except for their ambiguously graphic, finished surfaces. Propped up on elbows, they enact the familiar hand gestures that denote the urgency to acknowledge the threat of expiry TIME IS UP. The three hands are the physical embodiment of a contemporary mantra.

Weeping Wall (2016) is an installation of two tears running down a wall. Wister Faure created the piece to invite people to ponder on how cathartic and necessary crying can be and find empathy for those who do.