“How do we learn to change for a future we can’t imagine?” asks the Tennessee-born sculptor as she prepares for her first New York solo show at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, opening December 8, 2016. An avid reader of magical realism, Bothwell Fels makes works that sits somewhere between folklore and sci-fi, an exploration of the here-now, neverwas, and maybe-could-be.

Fascinated with ruptures and growths, Bothwell Fels approaches sites-of-change both in body and land. Where dissected illustrations of erupting volcanoes and lactating breasts look very similar, by her hands the wood and plaster morphs into a new expression of such swellings. She turns to raw, physical materials to consider geological shifts in tangent with the places we make inside ourselves for growth.

Originally trained as a social psychologist, Bothwell Fels explores how environments can shift perceptions of being. She often works with mundane expectations of surrounding environments and subverts them into the unexpected and out-of-ordinary. Where are there seams between the real and the un-real? How does one become the other? Her architecture of affect and becoming explores the potential of curiosity as radical action in a time of disillusionment.

About the Artist: (b.1982/Knoxville, TN) Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels’ work is installed permanently at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York and was exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013). With her installation collective Rabid Hands, she has built installations in a former convent, an empty snow-machine warehouse, and an abandoned secret society hall. She holds a BA in Social Psychology from Stanford University (2004), and an MFA in from Columbia University (2016).