Huy Lam & Rod Mireau
Present. Tense.

[En anglais]

I began writing these notes while waiting between pickleball serves — suspended in a rhythm of motion and pause. The tension of the body and the stillness of waiting folded into each other, like yin and yang. Present. Tense. returned to me then: a grammatical hesitation that is also a bodily hesitation, a pulse stretched across time. The exhibition brought together two distinct approaches to equilibrium, staging a dialogue between compression and release.

Rod Mireau’s wooden constructions occupied the gallery’s western and rear walls, holding tension within apparently static forms. In Machine Artifact: Rings (2025), four elliptical wooden loops carried the visual weight of time through their sanded surfaces, suggesting duration compressed into matter. Machine Artifact: Loops (2025), composed of walnut elements connected by cord, appeared flexible yet structurally firm, hovering between looseness and restraint. The interplay between rigidity and pliancy gave these works a latent dynamism. Mireau’s constructions arrest motion at the threshold of release, compressing force into form. Standing before them, one sensed not movement but its suspension — as if the surrounding air were drawn inward, tightened by the work’s internal stress. In contrast, Huy Lam’s installations — distributed across the centre and eastern side of the gallery — cultivated a stillness that was not inert but attentive. If Mireau captures tension, Lam redistributes it. Rather than containing force, his works disperse it across body, object, and space, implicating the viewer in a subtle process of calibration. At the centre of the gallery stood Yield (2024), a metal plane balanced on a rounded Navajo skipper stone. Hovering at waist height, its matte surface absorbed light and its edges were ground thin enough to register the slightest touch. The work existed in a threshold state within the gallery space: when moved, the plane responded with a slow circular displacement, its movement unfolding over time rather than space. A faint tremor lingered, extending the moment of contact into a duration that had to be attended to rather than simply observed.