Two Rooms is proud to present Shape Shifting, a two-person exhibition featuring Sylvia Fernández (b. 1978, Lima, Perú) and Jamie Franks (b. 1994, San Diego, CA). Fernández and Franks are artists who are keenly aware of themselves as living beings, who locate their humanity in relation to other creatures and their environments. They consider the most meaningful and meaningless elements of our world, from the sunrise to the fur a dog has shed. In Shape Shifting, Fernández’s paintings and Franks’ sculptures encompass and contend with what is fleeting and intangible, whether sublime or humble.

Both artists’ processes are open and inquisitive, letting questions and feelings fester until they are led to a way of connecting imagery or manipulating material. Fernández works serially, making paintings with an emphasis on certain natural phenomenon. The pieces in Shape Shifting emerged out of Fernández’s recent trip to Joshua Tree National Park, where she spent several days absorbing the desert. She noticed the arid silence, the whispers of the wind, the connection between sunlight and time, and the feeling of her own skin as the boundary between her inner mind and the vast wilderness.

Led by the physical materiality of oil paint, Fernández’s begins with a base that sits somewhere in between land, water, and air. Based on what appears before her, she responds with a concave or convex form that blends body parts with the landscape. Fernández invents imaginary habitats in which heads, pelvises, thighs, vulvas, and hands are intertwined with the sky, sand, flora, and fauna.

While Fernández’s subject matters melds into itself, Franks’ disparate material combinations cause friction. Franks’ interdisciplinary practice is founded upon a fascination with entropy and dissonance. Upon a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Franks was transfixed by a dilapidated Greek ruin, whose delicate fragments were pieced together with a thick, abrasive metal armature. This is the logic of museum display, which paradoxically alters and confines the essence of an object in an attempt to make it withstand time.

Franks plays off this trope, miming institutional language of preservation and containment with an archive of her own. Poking fun at the expectation of permanence, Franks’ sculptures emanate an understanding of the limits of imposing control over a material. In the lexicon of a religious relic, she carefully confines a nylon mold of her body to observe and protect it as it ages. A found scorpion is painstakingly salvaged and enshrined in glory, as is a rose formed with heat and Isomalt, a perishable sugar alternative. Notably, heat is a central mechanism of her material transformations.

Shape Shifting references the artists' unique ability to create in dialogue with organic subject matter constantly in motion. Fernández’s imagery blends the contours of the natural world, positing life as one interconnected entity. Franks morphs the material properties of the mundane, reconfiguring an object’s content and significance. In their own distinct languages, Fernández and Franks present us with alternative ways of imagining the physical and temporal confines of our own minds and bodies in relation our surroundings.