Nothing’s True Forever, a two-person exhibition featuring the multidisciplinary practices of Jon Pylypchuk and Reinhart Revilla Selvik, is an exploration of the embodied architectures around memory (individual and collective), loss, and the collapsing into identity.
Memory is beyond the individual — when bodies and consciousness are entangled into the fabric of a city and each other — memory moves through the passenger, through things, a magnetism of unfinished feeling, a shared ache that demands witness. In this exhibition, Pylypchuk and Selvik’s works build a landscape where individual memories, reworked and coalesced, are entangled in playful relationships of witnessing.
There are events that arrive too soon to be felt, and so they live on, not in time, but in the trembling between moments–that slippery space between the action of daily consciousness. With the paradox of loss (of a person, place, or thing), meaning remains (in the shadow of what was) even when that thing is absent. The past leans forward, pressing against the present, an imprint pressed into the surface.
In Selvik’s practice, the memory returns with its own agency, an insistence that resists translation. Built and discovered as an accumulation of embodied gestures on the surface of the painting, remembrance and allegory take shape into a recognizable architecture, often dramatic scores of lived reality. Power dynamics and tender memories are conveyed within active relationships at the intersection of the individual and community. His multi-disciplinary process remains grounded in site-specific explorations of urban landscapes, especially those rooted in peripheral perspectives. The tension between the vast scale of a city can exist within the soft space of a mind. What happens when a place of memory no longer exists in a physical location?
When nothing is lost, everything is transformed. This building phrase consoles in the context of mourning and grief in Pylypchuk’s work. What disappears from our plane only shifts form, energy, and presence. Memory is the medium of that transformation contained within the physical boundaries of simple materials (a purse, a bowling ball, buckets, polyurethane foam, etc.) that Pylypchuk assembles into choreographies of figuration. Jon suggests a moment where loss continues to be woven into the fabric of becoming, echoing, and haunting yet ever watching the story unfold. Often, his characters draw upon the animal world to explore the frailty of human existence and social relationships, in this case everyday objects are anthropomorphized trusting their existence among ours.
Pylypchuk and Selvik’s works encode the visual and psychological imprints of the modern metropolis—its fleeting moments, its persistent echoes — present and pervasive, while sometimes ignored. Nothing’s True Forever, interfolds the essence of each artist’s practice, manifesting the signature of consciousness into the humorous, livable, and ultimately tangible
