Modules and Other Nonsense

Elliot Doughtie and Shir Ende

December 7th - January 14th

Langer Over Dickie is proud to present a series of works by artists Elliot Doughtie and Shir Ende in Modules and Other Nonsense. Utilizing silk screen schematics and a contractor’s magic wand, Doughtie and Ende leverage layering and modulation, illustrating transitional architectures of interior built spaces and constructed identities. 

Constructed environments and non-vernacular architecture serve as default way-finding scenarios, where persons corral through predetermined transitional territories. While adherence is not the twin of conformity, dominant culture prevails in human-designed public spaces, as it does in the structures behind their walls. Modules and Other Nonsense illuminates these tenuous relationships without basely appealing to the target of their subtle restraints: the autonomy of human movement and the desires expressed therein. 

The works in the exhibition perform a surrogacy for bodies traversing transitional spaces. Doughtie and Ende reassert a choreography with an embedded means of fluidity, via layered processes of screen printing and installation interventions. Here, the artists engender unique encounters and orientations that outstrip fixed perimeters and presumed functionalities. 

Elliot Doughtie is a Baltimore-based artist originally from Dallas, TX. Doughtie’s current practice utilizes drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation in the service of generating new experiences that transcend existing boundaries or assumed functions. Cosmic landscapes and bathroom plumbing are used as metaphors for the body in transition in his own explorations of the fluidity of gender and sexuality. 

Selected venues include Fjord Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), School 33 Art Center (Baltimore, MD), The Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX), Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), and Re:Art show (Brooklyn, NY). Artist residencies include ACRE (Steuben, WI). Doughtie received a BA from Tulane University and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. He is a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artst Award receipient. 

Shir Ende is a Chicago-based artist and educator. Ende received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has shown at Hyde Park Art Center, Heaven Gallery, Gallery 400, Terrain Biennial, South of the Tracks, Mana contemporary, Woman Made Gallery and was a Sponsored artist at High Concept Labs. She has screened videos at Nightingale, Comfort Station and Roman Susan. She has participated in the Center Program at the Hyde Park Art Center and is a 2018 - 2019 Hatch Resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition.

Through drawing, sculpture, and video, I use a degree of speculative thinking to explore movement within modern space. I work to reduce the “bigness” of architecture, re-imagining built structures as intimately scaled, malleable forms. In doing so, I aim to minimize architecture’s imposition on the body and softens the authority of modern design. My work examines the inherent tension between the straight lines of architectural order and the fluidity of bodies within. As I construct shared spaces for closeness and collaboration, I quietly insist on self-determined movement within modern space, where the body itself is a generative material.