Exhibitions —

april april is proud to present Muffler, a three-person exhibition featuring the work of New York-based artists Kai Jenrette and Cyrilla Mozenter, and Qamani’tuaq, Nunavut-based artist Irene Avaalaaqiaq Tiktaalaaq.

Muffler offers an extent to which symbolisms are propagated to serve an autonomous presence. An auditory dimension unites the group, which is understood in part by each artist’s material choices and inclinations toward diffusion.

Noise dims to focus; a knock begins again, its echo; these the murmurations of origin, its myth. The creation of any world begins in the collapse of image and material—as in modernism, or craft—and navigates transformation toward a sustained quietude or muffling.

To read Jenrette, Mozenter and Tiktaalaaq in concert evokes diffusion for its paradox: a means of disseminating through storytelling, and making ambient, soft, or blurry that which tends to concentrate. Diffusion then qualifies a kind of universality that presages autonomy.

Monzenter and Tiktaalaaq use colored felt to make wall hangings. Felt is composed of millions of fibers, whose frictional energy absorbs sound. Mozenter constellates motifs unique to her visual language, silk-stitched into torquing, free cut swaths of color. Tiktaalaaq, through a method of appliqué and embroidery, composes scenes of rounded, transforming figures in awe, translating oral history to form.

Here, too, pulled from a series titled More saints seen, Mozenter’s felt explorations manifest free-standing sculptures that resemble reliquary objects. These containers evoke time immemorial, though fail to function beyond themselves as phantoms. Communing alongside are Jenrette’s basswood carvings, which take on coloration and texture by a method of being stained, burned or oxidized. They are solid by contrast and, in so doing, penetrate reality with their hereness. His drawings on waxed newsprint exhaust the medium of graphite, where over-rubbed pencils produce shimmering blacknesses around buoyant, type-like elements. Jenrette in this way notates the self, scores space with the sound of becoming.

Kai Jenrette (b. 2001, Baltimore, MD) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art. He has exhibited at White Columns, New York; Cooper Union, New York; Gated, Ridgewood; and My Perfect Environment, Chicago. He recently completed a residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and published I'M PERFECT LIFE'S PERFECT I LOVE BEING ME with Du-Good Press, Brooklyn.

Cyrilla Mozenter (b. 1947, Newark, NJ) lives and works in Stony Point, NY. Solo exhibitions include See Why and the failed utopian, Lesley Heller Gallery, New York; the failed utopian & Other Stories, FiveMyles, Brooklyn; warm snow, Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York, and the Garrison Art Center, Garrison; Very well saint, The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and More saints seen, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT.

Octave, her bilingual collaborative book with photographer Philip Perkis was published in 2020 by anmoc press, Seoul. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received two fellowships from the NY Foundation for the Arts and two project grants from The Fifth Floor Foundation. She has been in residence at Pianpicollo Selvatico, Dieu Donné Papermill, and Instituto Municipal de Arte e Cultura-Rioarte.

Mozenter’s work is held in numerous public collections across the United States, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, among others. She taught for many years in the MFA program at Pratt Institute.

Irene Avaalaaqiaq Tiktaalaaq (b. 1941, Kivalliq Region, Nunavut) lives and works in Qamani’tuaq, Nunavut. She is one of Canada’s most renowned Inuit artists. Her textile wall hangings have been exhibited across Canada and the United States. Her work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, WAG-Qaumajuq, Remai Modern, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, among many others.