Thursday May 1st: CHEMOSYNTHESIS Artists Kaylin Andres and Max Ritvo

Rabbithole is proud to present CHEMOSYNTHESIS
Artists Kaylin Andres and Max Ritvo

Opening Reception May 1st
6-10pm

Reading by Andres and Ritvo at 8:30 followed by Communion and performance at 9:00.
Special performance by experimental comedy troupe His Majesty the Baby

(Andrew Kahn, John Griswold, Shon Arieh-Lerer, Nathan Campbell, Max Ritvo)

Projection mapping by guest artist Morgan Freeman

"In biochemistry, chemosynthesis is the biological conversion of molecules and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic molecules as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis."

The chemosynthetic process is a dark mirror to the photosynthesis that fuels the plants that in turn, fuel us. It replaces the basic undergirding energy source of life: light, with poison. This process is not simply some aberration found in esoteric microbes-- in the Mariana trench, the black, hot, sulfur-spewing crevice in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean out of which new ocean-surface grows, seven foot long worms line their guts with bacteria for turning methane into a meal. An entire ecosystem has learned to live with no light.

Artists Kaylin Andres and Max Ritvo met in Memorial Sloane Kettering Hospital. Both in their twenties, their shared diagnosis of metastatic, most likely terminal Ewing’s Sarocoma prematurely cut them off from the literal and metaphorical Sun that lights up the work of most young artists. Kaylin’s physically exhausting work as an up-and-coming fashion designer was impracticable. Max’s activity as a performance artist was impracticable, and his poetry needed to find new footing. It was time to evolve—not in the way birds evolved to soar over the ocean, but in the way worms evolved to live on poison.

CHEMOSYNTHESIS is a diary of the adaptation of two animals, their creativity, their religion, to a new diet and a new ecosystem. From the materials of a hospital world, Andres and Ritvo set out to build a simulacrum of the world they once loved. The art is in the failure of this art to imitate life. It is in the insurmountable obstacles, psychological and logistical, that the creativity of Andres and Ritvo are forced to take on in the face of hospitalization, isolation, medication, enervation. The art is in their tragic struggle to create despite it. It is a show that is part performance art, part poetry reading, part visual installation. It promises the viewer a scuba suit and immersion not just in a mind quite unlike their own, but in an experience unlike anything they could possibly fathom.

Ritvo and Andres find substitution for sunlight: in an eerily charming installation, Andres lights a room with bottles of painkillers collected during cancer treatment and transforms them into strange, glowing cylindrical fruit. They forge new traditions: Andres, too weak to man her sewing machine, makes embroidery using her own hair in the tradition of Victorian mourning—but a hospital gown is the medium into which her chemo-poisoned hair is stitched and the imagery is startling, unforgivingly clear: skulls, peeled open eyeballs, stigmata: reminders that suffering and death are an integral part of life. In “Reliquary for a Remission”, Andres creates shadowboxes and sacred talismans that invoke the spectacle of illness and our need for superstition and faith in times of darkness. Andres’ digital prints take a closer look at the materials in her everyday life: a tangle of hair, the fiber of a hospital robe, cancerous cells—all magnified with an electron microscope and abstracted into magnificent patterns.

They rewrite their internal organs: Ritvo’s poems figure new physiological mechanisms for emotions. They restructure argument and conversation: Ritvo’s performance art troupe His Majesty the Baby makes maddening havoc and hilarious sense in their dizzying, cerebral, fast-paced sketches and performance dance pieces. As a testament to their synthesis from children of light to children of the depths, Andres and Ritvo ingest oral chemotherapy in a Chemo Communion ceremony, symbolically uniting them with the poison that has given their bodies extended life, and death.

BIOS:

Kaylin Andres is a fashion designer, writer, and three-time survivor of Ewings Sarcoma. Her experience as a young adult with cancer is chronicled on the MTV series World of Jenks, and in her colorful graphic novel Terminally Illin’, published by Last Gasp. Kaylin has garnered a large audience through her blog, Cancer is Hilarious, where she has documented her 5 year cancer battle with unnerving honesty and a heavy dose of sarcasm. She has worked with notable fashion designers such as Betsey Johnson and Rachel Antonoff, and currently collaborates with visual artists in NYC. Kaylin continues to advocate for young adults with cancer, and has been featured on NPR's The Takeaway, BBC Radio, MTV Act, The Huffington Post, and Planet Cancer.


Max Ritvo is a poet studying for his MFA at Columbia and a performance artist based in the New York City experimental comedy troupe, His Majesty the Baby. He is currently engaged in a long-running performance art project with Marina Abramović, called She Doesn’t Know. The piece,engages an unwitting Marina Abramović in a performance piece that
consists of any actions either performer makes until Marina Abromović becomes aware of the piece. His poetry has been published in Chronogram and The Yale Literary Magazine, and he has written for the
Academy of American Poet’s website, poets.org. Max has also has been fighting Ewing’s Sarcoma, a rare extra-skeletal cancer, for the past six years. He and Oustide Joke have raised tens of thousands of dollars towards Sarcoma Research.