Whereas during the 1960s and 1970s unconventional art materials infiltrated the gallery space to subvert the rational purity of the white cube, today soil, living plants, and mould become involved in a subtler, organic dialogue with the artist and with the site in which their encounter unfolds. Lie\u2019s exhibition Unnamed Entities<\/em> is a quintessential manifestation of this conceptual turning point. The installation, a new commission created specifically for the museum\u2019s lobby gallery, brings together traditional terracotta ceramic vases, jute and hemp fabric, natural fibre ropes, straw and hay bales, mud with spores and seeds, and thousands of cut flowers. Flying in the face of the classical conventions that still implicitly dominate the aesthetics of what we see in museums, Lie stages multi-\u00admaterial becomings that are impossible to preserve and collect. As time unfolds, each entity is transformed; some wilt and decay as others germinate and bloom, forming new entities along the way. Through its title, the exhibition nurtures a desire to disown the ordering systems of natural history and, with them, the Aristotelian hierarchization of the living that still informs our value systems today. The practice of unnaming, one that in this gallery space is performed by the agency of materiality rather than the artist\u2019s anthropocentric privilege, in essence, is a process of unlearning. As we let materials undo meaning, we begin to see afresh beneath the cultural stratifications that often occlude our experience of reality with pre-encoded concepts that have been naturalized over time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unnamed Entities<\/em> is a sensorial experience involving smell as much as sight. It deliberately mobilizes the viewer\u2019s body to instigate a journey of discovery that is as personal as it is uncharted. Meaning appears dispersed, networked, and unscripted. Traditional symbolism is shattered. Lie invites us to make sense of the installation, its aesthetic, and its material presence outside of any notions of genre that might provide easy art-historical pigeonholing. As matter is allowed to take charge of its own independent, entropic agency, we are faced with the impossibility of saying what it is that we are experiencing exactly. Despite its earthly and floral components, Lie\u2019s installation is not a monumental memento mori<\/em>. It is not asking us to contemplate our mortality in order to make the most of our present. Instead, it brutally grounds us in the present because, outside of our cultural constructions, this is all we truly have. But all materials in Unnamed Entities<\/em> also imply a past. Their presence is, in different ways, evidence of atavistic processes that we have been taught to fear or ignore, tangible traces of the unstoppable becoming that governs all life on this planet, across species, upon territories, throughout time. Words such as death and life become meaningless. Unnamed Entities<\/em> wants us to become brave enough to give up all cultural frameworks so that, albeit briefly, we might catch at least a glimpse of the pre-linguistic world that we left behind on the way to becoming human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"105_CR_Aloi_Daniel-Lie_UnnamedEntities_07\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_CR_Aloi_Daniel-Lie_UnnamedEntities_07-scaled.jpg\")
Unnamed Entities<\/em>, exhibition views, 2022.
Photos : Dario Lasagni, courtesy of New Museum, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"105_CR_Aloi_Daniel-Lie_UnnamedEntities_02\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_CR_Aloi_Daniel-Lie_UnnamedEntities_02-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"105_CR_Aloi_Daniel-Lie_UnnamedEntities_03_lr20220426\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_CR_Aloi_Daniel-Lie_UnnamedEntities_03_lr20220426.jpg\")
Unnamed Entities<\/em>, exhibition view, 2022.
Photo : Dario Lasagni, courtesy of New Museum, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n