WHATIFTHEWORLD presents Chris Soal’s Debut at Armory Art Fair, NYC 2024.

With a new body of work created for Armory 2024, WHATIFTHEWORLD gallery is pleased to debut Chris Soal’s first New York solo presentation at the Armory Art Fair’s Focus section, curated by Robyn Farrell (Senior curator, the Kitchen, New York). Capturing the Focus section’s theme of the avant-garde spirit that has defined the fair since its inception in 1994, Soal’s work converses with historical art dialogues, echoing the revolutionary energy of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art while addressing contemporary issues with urgency and insight.

Utilising his signature discarded and mundane ephemera, the installation-style presentation poetically contains a deep longing to expose the destructive relationship between humankind and nature by engaging the viewer’s spatial awareness of their own body in relation to the monumental organic forms that shape these large-scale sculptures. Soal’s exhibition, reflecting on the interconnectedness of micro and macrocosms, becomes a metaphor for the global ecological network. The use of discarded items resonates with the Armory Art Fair’s curated Focus section on avant-garde histories and radical strategies where his sculptures, as a continuation of Duchamp’s concept of the found object, acquire new relevance in the context of environmental sustainability. They prompt a reconsideration of consumption patterns and the impact of human activity on the planet.

Soal’s practice goes beyond the mere use of industrial and natural materials; it is about the embrace of these elements and the powerful phenomenological ‘frisson’ they generate within the viewer. Soal’s choice of materials—toothpicks, concrete, electric fencing cable and bottle caps—speak to this embrace. They are not random but carefully interwoven to create sculptures that resonate with the viewer to contend with industrialisation, consumption and the body within nature.