This Too Is A Fortress

Inga Manticas, Gabriela Corretjer-Contreras, and Sam Hains

PUTTY'S CORONATION is pleased to announce the opening of This Too Is a Fortress, a group exhibition featuring the work of Inga Manticas, Gabriela Corretjer-Contreras, and Sam Hains at Putty’s Coronation on 483 17th St, 4B, Brooklyn, NY 11215 from September 8th - October 14th, 2023.

This Too Is a Fortress, brings together three artists, all constructing realms of individual fantasy through videos, drawings, and sculpture. Castles form the show’s foundation, allegorically used by each artist to challenge conventional perspectives on longing, aspiration, and the preservation. Originating in the High Middle Ages as a tool of military power and control, today castles have been rendered technologically obsolete, yet the image of a castle stands today as a glittering symbol of duality, a place to explore the interconnectedness of imagination and reality, loss and hope, fragility and grandeur.

For his Putty’s debut, Saim Hains presents Lost Home Worlds, a series of interactive NFTs depicting castles inspired from Mike Kelley’s Kandors (1999-2011). For Hains, Kandors has a deep connection to his own inquiries into the nature of authenticity in our technologically-mediated world. Where Kelley set out to explore the fragmented nature of collective memory and meaning-making, Hains seeks understanding of how these kinds of representations resonate and uses the metaphor of the shrunken city in the bell jar to investigate the idea of memory palaces and their role in trauma processing.

Alongside Hains’s animations, Inga Manticas’s video essay, Home Town, explores four lands, three mythical and one earthly: Atlantis, Fairyland, Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” and the artist’s hometown, Sacramento, CA. Composed of found footage of sandcastles washed away by ocean waves, Manticas’s narration chronicles an interior world labyrinths of fantasy, against the backdrop of climate crisis, natural disasters, and urban development shape our imagery of place and home. Complementing the video installation, Manticas’s series of drawings depict interconnected domains of existence, grounded in real places, and traveling to a more heavenly realm.

Lastly, Gabriela Corretjer-Contreras presents a set of three narrative ceramic sculptures, Chica Sexy Numero 1, 2 y 3, each set in a re-imagined Polly Pocket — a popular children's toy from the 1990’s. In Corretjer-Contreras' version, ceramic playsets become the catalyst for desire and self-reliance. Protected from outside force and influence, each ceramic piece offers an utopian ideal of refuge.

Inga Manticas is a visual artist based in Brooklyn. Their work explores the relationship between fantasy, animacy, and the natural landscape. Inga holds a BA in American Studies and Visual Art from Columbia University, and works as an art educator.

Sam Hains is a digital artist whose practice centers around the critical examination of digital tools and their connection to modernity. His work seeks authenticity in an increasingly simulated world

Gabriela Corretjer-Contreras (1995, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a New York based artist who uses textiles, installations and performance as a way of imagining a future for a society with an “identity crisis”.