Margot Samel presents Analog Mountain, by Merike Estna. This is the Estonian-born, Mexico City-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In the work, themes of family, climate, and representation are troubled through a series of works that emerge from an interest in historic lineages of art and logic at play in structuring our present day.
The title of the exhibition is drawn from 20th-century French novelist René Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing. The allegorical story, unfinished in the writer’s lifetime, follows a group of mountaineers as they work to climb Mount Analogue, an enormous mountain on a surreal continent, invisible and inaccessible to the outside world, and only perceived by applications of obscure knowledge. A mountainous and cavernous terrain is the artist’s point-of-view for this body of work– a series painted as though peering from the mouth of a cave, each describing a record of time painted onto the walls of the enclosure. Some works emerge as doubled paintings, both portrait and cave-like paintings so that the viewer may locate themselves, in these works, inside the mountain itself.
–Emily Small