If silt saw a window When a wave flared blue

Max Popov and Zhi Wei Hiu

PUTTY'S CORONATION is pleased to announce the opening of If silt saw a window /When a wave flared blue, a two person exhibition featuring Max Popov and Zhi Wei Hiu . The opening will take place on Saturday, November 9th, from 6-9pm. The show will be up until December 15th, 2024.

M:

In 2002 a freight ship collided with another vessel in the English Channel. It sank on the spot in shallow water along with its cargo of newly minted luxury cars. Days later, slipped in fog with an absent horizon and choppy radio, two more ships braised the sunken remains despite navigation aids and heavy coastal patrol. This large-scale disturbance created a new category of sea marker, an emergency wreck buoy. Intended for deployment immediately after an accident, it is a temporary gravestone, a document of the instant before any documentation. Before any record on maps, guides, or charts there lies a beacon floating above the sway and swell of circumstance.

Buoyancy is at extreme proportions when the volume of water displaced by a buoy is measured against the reach of its signal. Yet from the aforementioned picture buoyancy falters when signals fail to reach. Disaster from natural or human causes often lead to the loss of records, though some objects will drift until they’re noticed: messages in a bottle, commercial wreckage, or rubber ducks from a container ship. A buoy on a lake in Germany serves as a mailbox, it remains anchored but afloat like a late letter always arriving on time.

Z:

A sprue is the aperture conveying molten metal into a mold, a channel for focusing embryonic potential.

A well-placed sprue is easily removed.

An uncut sprue makes visible hands of unnamed human agents who sow trachea for perforation of void.

Sprue: umbilical cord, superfluous appendage, phantom limb.

Observing a sprue: The work is not, in fact, complete. The codex is ripe for consumption, cycling back into seed. Is the corpse complete? It is exquisite aftermath and limb sprouts vestigial. Primal body iterates, this and all after are. To be fixed is the first illusion. Spectral compression of past and apparition of future.

place a sprue on the inside of the vessel place two superfluous sprues place a sprue where texture will be eliminated

M:

An infestation in the basement: subterranean termites—unfortunately the most cherished things ended up being the most cellulosic and therefore palatable. Before this mess what was left of the family photos were muddy facsimiles, photographs of photographs on copy paper, sun-bleached from being taped onto the dashboard of the car. And now, relics. The jester, his words, mere fibers. The linens, catalogs, keepsakes; strewn pieces of ephemera, life in storage, digested. Fortunately, the old computer was safe. But the styrofoam encasing had taken an eating. Do termites eat styrofoam? Termites only tunnel through styrofoam, either to insulate the larvae or reach whatever is beyond it. Oh immutable styrofoam, at first glance consumed…humbug. What’s left is a rebus: termites, swiss-cheesed mementos, a styrofoam-shaped I…between you and I, a memory, and now an accident.

Z:

I learnt to trace the outline of my body in the darkroom. In the crepuscular glow of a red safelight, a finger traces the curl of paper grain, twist and arc of palm deflect linear emanations from bulb of enlarger. Photo-muscular memory: precise pressure between index and thumb; angle of wrist and twist of torso swaying lightness in finger-prints as beaded chemistry drips.

Image takes form before pupae floating dilated. An analog: in the flare of an oxy-acetylene torch, red-hot selenotrope mirrors molten pearl. Supervisible in its evanescence, the unfixed casts allure. Discerning the afterimage through silt or slit. What does the oyster see?

the forms are beautiful because you know they’re unfixed the afterimage of

Max Popov is an artist living in New York City. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2019. He has held solo exhibitions at Parent Company and Chatham Soccer. His work has been included in group show and gatherings at Shower, Seoul; Emily Harvey Foundation, New York; Electrozavod, Moscow; Swiss Institute, NY; HISK exhibition space (Snooperverse: Moveable Types), Brussels; among others.

Zhi Wei Hiu (b.1992, Singapore) lives and works in New York City. They received a BFA in photography from The New School in 2016. They work with processes and materials relating to analog darkrooms, jewelry fabrication and silverpoint drawing.