Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens: Alternative Facts of the 21st Century

Jane Lombard Gallery, New York

The Canadian artist duo Richard lbghy & Marilou Lemmens—primarily working in sculpture, video, and installation—takes on ceramic sculpture in their second solo exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York. Their eponymous ongoing series of colorful hand-modeled ceramic works give form to questionable facts, rumors, and conspiracies since the turn of the new millennium, accompanied by a series of stylized data charts and a video work in the downstairs project gallery.

The collaborative practice of lbghy & Lemmens is marked by a neo-conceptual desire to make ideas visible. Occupied with the history of science, the language of economy, the magic of statistics, the capacity for models to impact the future, the aesthetics of data visualization, and the design of laboratory experiments—Alternative Facts of the 21st Century (2021-current) embodies a new chapter of constructing art objects to give form to ideas. Ambiguous, poetic, playful, witty objects populate the gallery space. Simple yet refined wooden plinths evoke the reading of these ceramic sculptures as historical monuments of our century’s questionable, alternative facts. The bright-colored sculptures are presented as para-monuments, accompanied by their “false” truths as backstories of the handouts in the gallery, numbering the narratives of the three-dimensional commemorations.

Paper collage works of brightly colored charts, graphs, and abstracted visualizations elevate statistics to high art. The ongoing series What We Know for Sure (2017-current) confronts the viewer with the aesthetic qualities of abstract representation in the form of statistics. An unlikely rediscovery of data visualization going beyond their function of communicating data but also displaying beauty—a direct result of the artists’ meticulous culling of information found in academic journals, essays, and conference proceedings and a structural questioning of knowledge. To conclude, the video work What Birds Talk About When They Talk (2019-2021) is showcased in the downstairs project gallery. The—almost immersive—video invites us to reconsider our interpretative acts. A humorous venture of eclectic cross-cultural references encompassing science, mythology, cartoons, and literature, enhanced by its alienating soundtrack of calling, drumming, tweeting, screaming, news reporting, philosophizing, and prophesying birds.

The exhibition runs from October 27 until December 17, 2022. For more information, please visit Jane Lombard Gallery’s website.