
Destinations/ Departures,
Sophie Kovel: Happy Hours
May 13—May 26, 2022
Iron Velvet is pleased to present Sophie Kovel: Happy Hours, an exhibition curated by Victoria Horrocks.
she sat at a desk until it was unbearable
weighing that impermissible disclosure
they learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths,
dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths
after years of false voices and cutting the grass
and followed by an act of conscience
—Sophie Kovel, paraphrasing Edward Snowden
Sophie Kovel’s practice is both playful and severe. Her bold conceptual interventions visualize how mass media and systems of power institute ideologies that shape our perceptions, serving as instruments of social control. Through subversive wallpaper, the manipulation of legal documentation, and the disruption of ready-made objects, Kovel exposes what Stuart Hall defines as the “myth of democratic pluralism,” the pretense that society is held together by common and just norms.
In her most recent work, United States of America v. Reality Leigh Winner (Leaked), she addresses the case of whistleblower and intelligence specialist Reality Winner, who leaked a document outlining Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Winner was sentenced to four years in prison, the longest sentence for the transmission of classified information to date. She was released in February 2022. Exposing the U.S. government’s selected hold and release of information to the public, Kovel floods the gallery space with documents that comprise the entirety of Winner’s case. She creates a landscape of symbols of the democratic process to reenact the dissemination of Winner’s original disclosure: a five-page document that produced over 1,000 pages of court transcripts and evidence against and supporting her. Consisting of documents sourced from US National index PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the work performs a material leakage of documents to suggest a larger “leak” of governmental control into our daily lives.
Drawing on Edward Snowden’s phrase, “whistleblowing is a radicalizing event,” in which “radical” means an act of disclosure in “the traditional sense of radix, the root of the issue,” Kovel exposes the cores of hegemonic power and the possibilities of an act of dissent from below. The title Happy Hours jests at the convention to consume drinks in the gallery space; a pun on ideology and a semiotic twist: what seems happy-go-lucky at face value is sinister. The stakes are high. To see your complacency, just open the door.
— Victoria Horrocks
This exhibition is part of Destinations/Departures, a six-week rotating exhibition exploring the home as a dynamic space of movement, showcasing the work of artists Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, and Hyoju Cheon. Organized by Victoria Horrocks, Ho Won Kim and Carlota Ortiz Monasterio, it will be on view from April 28th to June 11th, 2022.
Sophie Kovel
Sophie Kovel (b. 1996, Los Angeles) is an artist, writer, and translator. Recent exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Demark; VERY Project Space, Berlin; and the Jewish Museum, New York. She has been an artist-in-residence at the School for Poetic Computation and Vermont Studio Center and is the recipient of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute Fellowship (2017), the Andrew Fisher Fellowship (2021–22), and the Agnes Martin Fellowship (2021–22). Kovel has spoken on panels and symposiums at universities and institutions including Columbia University and the Brooklyn Public Library. Her interviews and criticism have been published in Artforum, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Spike, and elsewhere. She is an MFA Candidate in New Genres at Columbia University and in 2022–23, she will attend the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Victoria Horrocks
Victoria Horrocks is an art historian, writer, and curator based in New York City. Her research focuses on theories of display, narratology, and image-text relationships, particularly as each pertains to the construction of history and production of knowledge. She is currently pursuing an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies at Columbia University. She is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Poltern: Confronting Contemporary Issues in Art History.
Destinations/Departures
New York, NY—Iron Velvet is proud to present Destinations/Departures, a six-week rotating exhibition exploring the home as a dynamic space of movement, where the limits between the private and the public, the local and the global, the personal and the political, are constantly being negotiated. Through three two-week solo shows of artists Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, and Hyoju Cheon, Destinations/Departures probes the diverse ways in which the domestic interweaves the individual, the collective, the political, and the cultural. It will be on view from April 28th through June 11th, 2022. In Destinations/Departures, each artist establishes an intimate dialogue with the domestic space of the gallery. Conceiving home not merely as a place of dwelling, but as one of mobility—of destination, transit, and departure—the three presentations suggest diverse modes of inhabiting the world. Through an innovative use of oil and pastel on aluminum, Nick Farhi renders seemingly commonplace domestic objects as extraordinary presences: portals mediating between the personal and the social. Sophie Kovel’s bold doormat series charges the ubiquitous, quotidian object with cultural iconography and political phrases to comment on the leakage of mass media culture into the private sphere. Lastly, through a site-specific installation, Hyoju Cheon sheds light on overlooked domestic spaces—corners, steps, window frames—and activates our often unnoticed relationship with the architecture of home. Through their distinct projects, each artist conveys an experience of being at home that is marked by multiplicity, movement, and interconnection. In blurring the public and the private, Destinations/Departures hopes to be its own journey to reconceptualize one’s sense of “home” in the world.