There Will Come Soft Rains

For its inaugural exhibition at 1 Rivington Street, CANDICE MADEY is pleased to announce an exhibition titled There Will Come Soft Rains.

The exhibition title comes from a short story by Ray Bradbury published in The Martian Chronicles in 1950, in which a fully automated house continues its daily routines devoid of human life. The domestic setting symbolizes humanity’s more ambitious attempts to control time and the environment, and the disastrous outcome of excessive productivity, consumption, and competition. The story concludes with the mainframe repeating the same date and time endlessly, linear concepts of time and progress having become obsolete. Rather, entropy and nature reclaim what remains of built human architecture.

The exhibition examines the tenuous logic of human lexica—such as language, architecture, taxonomies, or timelines—and the anthropic arrogance inherent to systems that are created to uphold existing hierarchies. Artists in the exhibition explore the tensions between structure and chaos, culture and nature, reason and instinct—ultimately embracing a strategy of fissure, decay, chaos, and rebirth.

The gallery is founded by Candice Madey. Previously, Madey was the owner of On Stellar Rays from 2008–2017. Since 2017, Madey has been consulting to private collections, non-profits, and foundations to create experimental programming and exhibitions that explore novel formats for supporting and presenting artists’ work, and this spirit of collaboration and experimentation is driving force behind the new gallery. Madey is also a co-founder of Second Floor Salon at 1 Rivington with architect Koray Duman. The salon hosts public and private events that encourage collaboration and conversation among artists, architects, writers, composers and thinkers. The gallery will continue these salons as part of its gallery exhibitions and programming.

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