HOSSEI
’ESSSENSSSE’
14 FEBRUARY – 24 APRIL, 2024
AUDIO DESCRIPTION
Audio descriptions for the blind and low-vision community have been developed for ESSSENSSSE by Sarah Empey and Anthia Balis, in collaboration with HOSSEI. These can be accessed via a QR code located at reception within the gallery. Verge encourages patrons to bring their own headphones.
Click here to listen/read the audio descriptions.
HOSSEI, ESSSENSSSE, 2023. Performer Lauren Booker. Dimensions variable. Photography by Jacquie Manning.
ID: A mid-shot of a performer from the waist up is pictured. The performer is wearing a silver-white sequinned bodysuit and pair of large goggles, made of the same silver material as the bodysuit. On one arm, the performer wears a structured sleeve, made in a tan/brown patterned material. A crystal-like formation, iridescent in colour and somewhat see-through, rests above the performer's head in a peak and flares out slightly to the waist of the performer.
HOSSEI AND NIKI JOHNSON
’ESSSENSSSE’ soundtrack
ARTIST STATEMENT
ESSSENSSSE began when HOSSEI became fascinated by the sand dollar sea creatures— their shape, features, and how in mediaeval times it was truly believed that sand dollars were mermaid currency. When looking at the sand dollar, HOSSEI realised that if you were to remove the physical characteristics of a human body, you would be left with a mouth and an anus, just like the sand dollar. It is this idea that compelled HOSSEI to make the sand dollar an emblem of the show. An entry point and an exit, not just with food, but in the sense of discerning which energies come through and nourish the insides, and which are let out. ESSSENSSSE is about letting go and being one with the spirit, and embracing its purity and vulnerability.
ESSSENSSSE is an aquatic ecosystem that explores the tenacity of the human spirit, stripping away corporeal human qualities and revealing what’s underneath. ESSSENSSSE is the third instalment to what HOSSEI calls his “sister shows,” O, presented at UTS Gallery & Art Collection (NSW) in 2023, and later THUNDERBLOOM at West Space (VIC) in 2023. Where O focused on the physical body, being up in the air and in transit, and THUNDERBLOOM looked at the human psyche, the weather in the mind, a stormy night – ESSSENSSSE is the next morning, the BODY, MIND, SPIRIT after a big night, looking at the sea for new beginnings.
EXHIBITION TEXT
It all makes so much SSSENSSSE
By Emma Finneran
◯umph! Better out than in I would hear my dad say after birthing air through his mouth hole–he was excusing the newly breaded air between us. The phrase is usually used to explain that letting out something bad you ingested is healthier than trying to keep it in. But what about the release of emotions, events and irritants that need releasing from our heart-holes? In expressing ourselves beyond the digestive realm, are we better out than in’ing the best we can in the emotional realm? I was reading about cells recently and learned that every cell in our body holds onto emotional experiences that we have not yet integrated, processed, or released. Cells are round, the sides connected, forming an unbroken whole; without interruption– does this mean our trapped emotional experiences are just spinning around and around, ad infinitum, with no clear way out? Hans Selye, Hungarian-Canadian founder of the stress theory, said, what is in us must out. We know it's better that way, but how do we heed the elusive knowledge of our mind, body and spirit in their ESSSENSSSE and accept, albeit gaseous, that the body knows exactly what it needs and is in fact just trying to do it, wordlessly. Oumph!
HOSSEI, ESSSENSSSE, 2024. Installation view. Photography by Jacquie Manning.
ॐ is a Sanskrit symbol representing a sacred sound, syllable or mantra, and is said to be the ESSSENSSSE of the supreme and absolute consciousness. In some traditions, ōm serves as a sonic representation of the divine and is why it is considered a sacred spiritual incantation. Heavily guided by the O formation the mouth takes, chanting ōm as a syllable is said to reveal the ESSSENSSSE of life. I find this interesting because when I was thinking about HOSSEI and his devotion to everything O (mouth, nostrils, nipples, portals, UFO’s, entries + closes etc.), I learned that in the Persian alphabet there is no written form of the vowel ‘o’, it only exists orally (interestingly, written Persian also does not have capital letters!). So HOSSEI’s relationship to the letter, sound, and form of O, from birth, has always been through chanting, speaking and singing; itself in its most powerful form. Also, the O in ōm is said to denote ‘yes’ and the O in spoken farsi is said to denote ‘open’, put together: yes, open seems like the only way to describe the intuitive, charismatically healing ESSSENSSSE of HOSSEI himself.
HOSSEI, ESSSENSSSE, 2024. Installation view. Photography by Jacquie Manning.
Open to the tides of life, HOSSEI’s work has always had a saṃsāric ◯ quality to it; speaking to beginnings as endings and endings as beginnings–an understanding that the sun setting today will rise tomorrow all while the earth spins. Conceived as a sister series of works orbiting around modes of healing, each of these series have been heterotopic islands by design; physical renditions or approximations of utopia; microcosms physically insusceptible to times ravages. The first instalment ‘O’ at UTS Gallery, Art & Collection in his Artist in Residence (NSW) 2023, was born into being via the healing of breath; how the process of involuntary respiration is alien yet crucial in our daily cycles of life. Followed by, THUNDERBLOOM, West Space (VIC) 2023, the tempestuous storm brewing in HOSSEI’s mother’s mind; was all about emotions exhuming from our deepest nethers. And now, the third and final instalment: ESSSENSSSE, Verge Gallery (NSW) 2024. Welcome to the island.
HOSSEI, ESSSENSSSE, 2024. Installation view. Photography by Jacquie Manning.
Like too many days at sea, limbs akimbo, walking through ESSSENSSSE makes me feel bad for sticking my finger in sea anemones as a kid that opened on the close. It is a world of fluorescent amoebic diatoms, plush starfish dazzling a carabiner, orange carpet entering your sole, opalescent acetate acting as a bubble girdle around a performer: purple scented with spicy flavour notes, ESSSENSSSE feels like you’re out of bounds but in bloom. Its life-affirming maximilism with otherworldly power, yet if you strip it all back, to the symbols alone ( ꩜⃝𑗘⍉0Oo), the communing O prevails. Looking up at a sphincter-like-scrunchie-disc I'm told it's referencing HOSSEI’s spirit animal, the sand dollar. A burrowing sea urchin, the sand dollar, in mythology, is referred to as mermaid currency (ōmg). It has only two holes– a mouth, an anus; nothing more than an entrance and an exit– and feels more HOSSEI than anything else I’ve ever seen. This is ESSSENSSE: a grand cyclic reminder that without flesh or feelings, we’re all just a mouth and an anus.
HOSSEI, ESSSENSSSE, 2024. Installation view. Photography by Jacquie Manning.
There is nothing pedestrian on site or in sight. Soothed by low ōm’ing dripping from the vibraphone, I realise that elementally–down to every single fibre– ESSSENSSSE is a manifestation of HOSSEI’s innate understanding that essentially we are all just complex, meaty and nebular ecosystems in a community with other living ecosystems in one massive ecosystem. ꩜ The characters of ESSSENSSSE grip you from the inside, promoting the fun of questions where there are no answers: is that a stingray in bondage at a disco? Sure! Is that a panna cotta boob bib on a bucket? Of course it is. They are parts or all of us. The darkest bits of our individual oceans summoned to the surface by someone who accepts and makes space for the grizzly bits our body is stuffed with: better out than in.
HOSSEI, ESSSENSSSE, 2024. Installation view. Photography by Jacquie Manning.
“Who are YOU?” are the three famous words respired from the blue caterpillars mouth to Alice in her Wonderland. They’re also the first three words HOSSEI ever said to me. (Like the caterpillar, he had blue hair at the time!) Ever since, he has dazzled me with his humble acceptance of everything; mended worlds in one onomatopoeic sweep, showing me the purity of inwardly focussing on how rum things can be. Like the caterpillar who teaches Alice how to cope with the difficulties she encounters in Wonderland, in ESSSENSSSE, HOSSEI encourages us to change size–how to switch gears, if need be–to adapt to our ecosystems by creating another ecosystem completely. Breathe in, breathe out.
Lean in to the healing feeling, our ESSSENSSSE makes SSSENSSSE here.