Our first exhibition in our 2023 New York Summer Series, The Coordinate Plane brings together new work by artists Laila Tara H, Megan Rae, Ilona Szalay, Sophie Milner, Kate Walters, Pippa Young and Suzy Spence. 

The exhibition looks at the cartesian idea of placing oneself, and one's life, on an axis and examining the truth of one's beliefs. It looks at the constructs we hold onto that are carved into the deepest corners of our psyche and shape the way we perceive the self and the other. Looking at oneself moving throughout the coordinate plane as we experience life. It aims to bring together a group of artists who in their practice look at the development of self, its fragmentation and marriages with the external world. 

The coordinate system we commonly use is called the Cartesian system, after the French mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), who developed it in the 17th century. Legend has it that Descartes, who liked to stay in bed until late, was watching a fly on the ceiling from his bed. He wondered how to best describe the fly's location and decided that one of the corners of the ceiling could be used as a reference point. 

Imagine the ceiling as a rectangle drawn on a piece of paper: taking the left bottom corner as the reference point, you can specify the location of the fly by measuring how far you need to go in the horizontal direction and how far you need to go in the vertical direction to get to it. These two numbers are the fly's coordinates. Every pair of coordinates specifies a unique point on the ceiling and every point on the ceiling comes with a unique pair of coordinates. It's possible to extend this idea, allowing the axes (the two sides of the room) to become infinitely long in both directions, and using negative numbers to label the bottom part of the vertical axis and the left part of the horizontal axis. That way you can specify all points on an infinite plane.