Hayden Dunham’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, NEVER IS OVER, stages the cosmological tendency towards reconnection through the artist’s most recent iterations of sculpture, video, and sound.

In the gallery’s central atrium, lifetimes of lilies, hand-written notes, and obsolete keys float overhead, weightless and free from gravity. A transparent ladder connects the floor and ceiling, leading down to the gallery’s lower level where a large glass battery sits, its contents leaking. Throughout the installation, a diaphanous score blends whale songs with the 526 hertz frequency of a black hole, a sonic register believed to aid cell regeneration.

Seven unassuming vessels placed throughout the lower gallery contain the recorded voices of the departed, with connections to the artist ranging from the personal to the inspirational (Octavia Butler, Pippa Garner, Radclyffe Hall, Sacha Kozlow, Sally Ride, William Winter, Sophie Xeon). These spoken messages can only be heard if the objects themselves are broken open, the light sensitive sounds inside are unlocked by the sun, and the contents set free.

What if redemption was the natural law of the universe? If redemption was not an act of salvation bestowed by a generous God, nor the fruits of willful self-improvement? What if there were no debt to be repaid, no pledge to be fulfilled, no perpetual atonement. If atoms, animals, people, and worlds always self-liberated, went upward, and returned to the heavenly matter from which they came? What if redemption was simply to rejoin?

The exhibition explores the premise that a return to oneness is the inevitable trajectory of both beings and things. Atoms, the smallest actors of the physical world, primarily organize into bonded pairs and groups. They do this because joint arrangements are simply more stable. Breakage happens but separation is temporary, as fragments recombine into new bonded pairs. This means that without the severing of bonds–without breaking open containers–there can be no subsequent joining or returning.

At the edge of separation, on the precipice of isolation, remember that letting go is necessary to come back together. Stars, too, pull in stray material, consuming solitary or free-floating matter and folding it into themselves. At every scale, matter tends toward relation and reconnection. Everything in the universe has been a star, and will be again. As the Buddhist adage goes: all beings have been your mother.

Theological notions of redemption promise wholeness through restored community or a healed self. But matter teaches us that all objects move toward more stable, connected states and that separation begets reattachment. NEVER IS OVER is neither a final judgment nor a resting state. It is without beginning or end: it is iterative, a continuous cycle, and a perpetual motion of which we are already a part.

Hayden Dunham channels the energies of earth and sky, research and ritual: a sculptor, performer, lyricist, musician whose work invites intimacy with the very forces that created the planet and the cosmos in which it spins. To get close to these forces is to slow down, open to mythic, elemental time. To get close to these forces is also to speed up, to experience the alchemical whirl that is forever change. To revolve, evolve, and open to constant transformation.

Steeped in environmental science, Dunham's work explores decay, decline, disability, loss, and ecological collapse through molecular processes that invite audiences to connect to the flows beyond capital, beyond instrumentalized time.

She orchestrates interactions between elements both visible and invisible, and her materials lists are attentive and expansive at once: tourmaline powder, pearls, volcanic water, lithium, silicon, syncopated beats, harmonies, glass, rubber, activated charcoal, lilies of the valley––she gathers widely into the cauldrons that make up the explorations into which she invites her audiences. Identities shift in and out of focus like dragonskins before shedding. Whether she is Hayden, Hyd, DD, QT, Quentin, or elixir itself, her work activates rites that connect beyond biography: to source, emergence, spirit, change.

Her work has shown at MoMA PS1 and Company Gallery in New York City; Artist Curated Projects, Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles; Thula Gallery in Reykjavik, Iceland; Artspace in Sydney, Australia; Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, France, among many others. Her exhibitions have also been included in the Shanghai and Gwangju Biennial. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.