Art Exhibition: Eternal Repair

Joshua Challen Ice’s exhibition Eternal Repair is a multimedia installation that tells the story of a renovation gone wrong. In a failed attempt to recreate his grandfather’s hunting cabin that was passed down to him, Ice works through a grandson’s inheritances in all its valences: genetic, physiological, psychological, and material worth, through the intersectional processes of labor, maintenance, and care. Mixing contemporary minimal aesthetics with construction-site drywall, bare two by fours, and rustic remnants, Ice works through the absurdity of recreating a paradoxical hunting cabin, an isolated rural dwelling and icon of masculinity, in a city gallery space, an interconnected and highly visible urban environment.

Eternal Repair presents a meditation on the ideas and processes of care, time, memory, and place explored through architecture and art-making that mines both the paradox and the surprising intersections of Ice’s vocation as an artist and his grandfather’s vocation as a tradesman taking inventory of what is passed down and what is disavowed. Ice offers up reparative critiques of masculinity and the arrogance of avant garde artistic ideologies in Eternal Repair’s mashup of high modernism-International Style forms with backwoods DIY aesthetics and the work’s manifestation of Ice’s desire to repair the self and others.

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