Fredj Moussa, Eddy Lopez, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Dalila Sanabria

We offer this exhibition as a point of connection between the inside and the outside, a chance to lose sight of the illusory barriers that keep many of us in a haze of distraction and preoccupation. When in distress, the pull to turn within can be strong. The works in this exhibition, taken together, offer a reminder that within and without are continuous. Those who suffer at the hands of our government are our neighbors, our friends, our artists, ourselves. Lines of flight, contemporary odysseys, the total dismantling of the normal are always close at hand. These four artists offer us an allegory of interconnectedness, a prophecy, a warning, a way of channeling the present and the past into a vision of collective power.

Emilio Martinez Poppe photographs the views from municipal service office windows in Philadelphia,working to understand the spaces of planning and regulation more holistically. The views photographed in this project belong to spaces—offices across the city—that touch so many people’s lives and are not necessarily accessible to everyone. While the city is the subject of the work performed in these spaces, the views conversely act as witness to the work.

In Fredj Moussa’s sound and video pieces, the flexibility of the oral form and the motion of images allows for the reinvention and molding of different stories. Working in collaboration with people he met by chance in Tunisia, the artist “heard fantastic stories that my logic rejects. This fictional world became for them a terrain of projection with infinite possibilities.”

Eddy Lopez, a survivor of war and a war refugee, amalgamates archives and memories of war into abstractions of vibrant colors, patterns, and shapes. His work searches for the proper artistic response to pain and suffering and interrogates whether it is right to seek inspiration from atrocities.

In 2009, Dalila Sanabria’s parents were deported from the United States to Latin America. The forced, physical uprooting she experienced shaped her youth dramatically and sparked her inquiry into the illusion of stability. Using cardboard, drywall compound, and personal relics, her domestic imagery recalls the transitory spaces of her childhood, prioritizing the use of craft and construction material in a preservative and anti-archival approach.