The Threshold Beckons

The Threshold Beckons, aligning the work of ascendent UK-based artists, Yulia Iosilzon and Nicola Turner, opens this evening in the gallery’s 112 Waterbury St. space. Comprised of a suite of new paintings by Iosilzon among tentacular sculptures by Turner, The Threshold Beckons marks Iosilzon’s fourth exhibition with CARVALHO PARK and Turner’s first US gallery show.

‘A limitless number of realities must exist,’ the protagonist of Ingmar Bergman’s 1978 film Autumn Sonata, Eva, insists, ‘not only the reality we can grasp with our blunt senses, but a tumult of realities that arch over and around, inside and outside.’ Confronted by the permanence of death, Eva eschews religious beliefs and arrives at a mystical theory of parallel worlds, and of a porous boundary between life and death. Bergman’s visionary thinking resonates with the existential concerns that unite new work by Iosilzon and Turner.

Bergman imagines different frames of reality interpenetrating one another, encircling our own reality’s central structure, creating unexpected meeting points where the thresholds between one world and another are thin. Bergman’s imagery could read as a description of one of Turner’s sculptures, tendrils comprised of horsehair and wool encased in netting that come together to entwine around metal supports. It could just as easily describe the atmosphere of fluid, looping motion filled with overlapping forms in Iosilzon’s paintings. Possibility of Living Three Lives at Once (2025) makes the work’s preoccupation with parallel universes explicit: it shows a figure meeting herself amongst a tangle of curves, dots and dashes — like there has been a snag in the space-time continuum, and the dense fabric that separates these women has briefly come undone. Turner and Iosilzon’s works are interested in liminality, in threshold states that offer the possibility of transformation, in ways of perceiving our surroundings through more esoteric understandings of being and non-being. These affinities are no coincidence. Iosilzon produced these paintings in response to Turner’s work, consciously creating an environment in which Turner’s creaturely sculptures could roam.