Memory Foam

Memory Foam
Layan Hell + Ella Belenky
July 14-16, 2023
VO Curations Tower Hill, London
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Layan Hell (Hellena Hueck and Maryam Fahim) and Ella Belenky’s first collaborative exhibition Memory Foam brings together accessories, paintings and found objects in an installation that elaborates a call and response between the practices – silent music of a fabric flute (Brushing on a Melody, 2023, Layan Hell) plays for the clip art outline of a farmhand (Banquet, 2023, Belenky).

Belenky’s flat, collaged paintings incorporate imagery from advertising and stock graphics in colourscapes that approximate land and sky. Reproducing ubiquitously legible symbols digitally and from the imagination with indexical marks, Belenky works through apparent contradictions between sensorial experience and mass imagery. Strawberry, coffee pot and pillow appear detached, their meaning suspended, mnemonic.

In a parallel ecology, Layan Hell’s wearables wiggle with the liveliness of natural and imaginative worlds. An egg springs from a metal pool in Pond (2023), a unit of potential. In other pieces, webbed and tadpole-like forms hint at creation stories. Integrating wax cast silver with found objects – Victorian buckle belt ring, wine stained cork – Layan Hell apply the mutability of metals to other materials, history prefiguring new stories, new life.

Necklace, earring or keychain indicates a means of attaching. The motif in X-stitch yokes two parts together. And Pouch (2023) references Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which repositions the container (not spear or axe!) as the original technology, a place to put something you want and take it with you.

Belenky’s Bird in Bush works riff on a street name local to her South East London studio. In the first, impressionistic tail feathers are uncoupled from any claim to place. The latter reproduces thethis construction as a sculptural diorama composed out of found porcelain, cardboard, magazine pages and a dead cactus. Half camouflaged in mirror ball tiles, the bird’s beady eye looks onto a viewer whose reflection fragments. This may be a clue to political investments entangled in Belenky’s post-internet visual language. At once: kitsch ornamentalism serving surveillance capitalism, and a tender care for its detritus.

Asking: ‘to what are we attached, and how?’ Belenky and Layan Hell suspend symbols at the edge of memory. Overly literal associations in Belenky’s paintings abstract the meaning of figurative components in the work, drawing attention back to colour and line. Whilst intuitive and materially-led connections in Layan Hell’s accessories forgo rationalist or cerebral frameworks for attachment, in favour of something closer to the skin.

- Jessie Krish
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Pin-Board with: Pond + Wave
2023
93 x 123 cm
Silver, egg, gemstone bead, pin-board, pins, felt, drawings, found concrete, sticker pack, dart board number ring, and found objects.
Layan Hell / Ella Belenky

Banquet
2023
51 x 61 cm
Oil paint and collage on canvas
Ella Belenky

Spider Wind Chime
2023
Silver, bronze, amethyst, cubic zirconia, felt
Layan Hell

DREAMZ
2022
30.5 x 25.5 cm
Oil on canvas
Ella Belenky

Gem In The Warm Sand
2023
102 x 117 cm
Oil paint and collage on canvas.
Ella Belenky

Brushing on a Melody
2023
50 x 34 cm
Chair, fabric, silver, note
Layan Hell

Lucky Pine Juice
2023
52 x 30 x 135 cm
Repurposed amber, gemstones, silver, found glass, drawing
Layan Hell

Bird In Bush
2023
52 x 30 x 135 cm
Found cardboard, porcelain, mirror tiles, tin foil, dried cactus, Astro Turf
Ella Belenky

 

Heart Meridian
2023
117 x 137 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Ella Belenky

Fountain
2023
61 x 51 cm
Oil paint and collage on canvas
Ella Belenky

Score / Butterfly + Pouch
2023
Music stand, moss, sliver, leather with hand drawing 
Ella Belenky / Layan Hell

Curtain
2023
30.5 x 25.5 cm
Oil paint and velvet on canvas
Ella Belenky

Kettle
2022
30.5 x 25.5
Oil paint on canvas
Ella Belenky

Bird in Bush
2022
51 x 61 cm
Acrylic and oil paint on synthetic silk
Ella Belenky

Genie Has Retired
2023
Glass bottle, cork, silver, gemstones, sand, sticker
Layan Hell

Becoming Bathtub
2023
30.5 x 25.5 cm
Oil paint on canvas
Ella Belenky

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Layan Hell is an exchange and accessory project by Maryam Fahim and Hellena Hueck. They met at Royal College of Art and are now based between Berlin and London. The ‘Wheel of Fortune’ tarot card set the grounds for collaborative work whose images and narratives derive from double yolked eggs, smoking earth tunnels and a practice based on limited resources. Layan Hell’s muddy hands flirt with nature, grasping at its liveliness.

Ella Belenky (b. 1991, USA) is a visual artist based in London, UK. Ella completed her undergraduate BA in Studio Arts at Bard College in Annandale, New York (2013) and her MA in Print at The Royal College of Art in London, UK (2019). Ella is interested in an expanded notion of print – the painterly gesture in conversation with a regurgitated image; re-formed, printed and displaced. These layered forms through which we communicate instil questions surrounding painted and printed matter and the way we learn about the world and each other through it.

Jessie Krish (she/her) is a London-based curator. Her interdisciplinary research, involving collaboration with artists and non-artists, has explored how conflicts, struggle and everyday practices shape the civic space, in contexts including social housing, climate policy and on football pitches. Jessie works part time as Projects Curator & Gallery Manager at Cell Project Space, and is a co-founder of artistic/ domestic project space Middlesex Presents. In 2022 she presented commissioned artist projects at CCA Glasgow, FormaHQ, London and Turf Projects, Croydon.
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Photos by Pok Yin Lam