Under the eyelid's mildness is an installation at OPEN by artist lexi welch, which situates Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus along lusty mixtape techno-logics. In Rilke's text—55 poems written feverishly during three weeks in the winter of 1922—Orpheus emerges as a character whose journey charts connections between loss and transformation, sweetness and death, wherein solitude proposes atemporal encounters with the other. Here, welch saturates the gallery in bass, playing the room as Orpheus' lyre. Pitched-down vocals are played through two subwoofers—their drivers facing OPEN’s walls—resulting in a subtle rattling of the room’s architecture and its visitors. The exhibition will run Thursdays through Sundays from sunset to sunrise, its duration extending along with the annual expansion of night hours. 

welch’s interest in bass began with a shaking of bay windows in their bedroom, vibrating in rhythm with passing vehicle sound-systems. This cross-sensory interaction—a sonic touching—evoked other unsanctioned spaces where throbbing bass tones act as the spatial-sensory fabric for dark, (ar)rhythmic, impermanent encounters with self and other. Warehouses, night clubs, city streets, the woods. welch explores bass / vibration as a technology of alterity, non-visuality, and heavy resonance, challenging visitors to consider a material that is both overwhelming and invisible; one which elaborates the disruptive, permeating distortions which structure and enable marginal life.

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lexi welch (b. 1991) works with image, sculpture, and sound in pursuit of the limits of representation, visibility, and the self. Current projects include a series of wet mirrors; an essay on an unrealized video about self-immolation; and a film set at the threshold to hell. Ambivalence, repetition, and homoerotics structure these inquiries. lexi holds a B.A. in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College, an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022. 

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OPEN is a place for things. This is our second public project. Questions? ben.sisto@gmail.com.