S C O T O P I A

Dylan Solomon Kraus • Fabian Adele • Paul Becker • Casey Bolding • Zuzanna Bartoszek • Phil Davis • Benji Grignon • Samuel Guerrero • Ted Gahl • Raphael Egil • Daniel Licht • Marc Henry • Tenki Hiramatsu • Henri Matisse • Christian John Munks • Sofya Shpurova • Hotaru Tachi • Suyi Xu •

A collaborative exhibition between CABIN, the MENAEA Collection and Hugo Alcantara.

Curated by Lawrence Hazen, Hugo Alcantara and Raja Umar Jamalullail

25 October 2024 - 14 November 2024 (extended)

11 am - 6 pm daily

93 Madison St, 10002 NYC

CABIN, the MENĀEA Collection and Hugo Alcantara are proud to present 'Scotopia', a group exhibition featuring works of ancient Asian sculpture from the MENĀEA Collection, a drawing by Henri Matisse from 1935 and a selection contemporary paintings. The exhibition opens on Friday, October 25 and runs until Friday, November 8.

The term Scotopia comes from the Greek skotos, meaning 'darkness', and -opia, meaning 'a condition of sight’. Scotopic vision names the ability of the eye to adjust under low-light conditions. It means to see in the dark.

Though scotopia has nothing to do with ‘topos’ – like in utopia, meaning place – I still wonder whether we couldn’t imagine it as somewhere people go; a place where a lot of us, in some sense, already live. In medieval times, melancholy was understood as a form of genius. And Cy Twombly first learned how to paint by practising in dimmed light. Might we consider residents of Scotopia as especially gifted in a similar way, finely tuned? To stare into darkness for a long time affords you certain privileges; to see nuance and specificity in the inexplicable, the mad, the surreal indicates you’re less likely to get lost.

The artists in this exhibition span centuries and continents and dimensions. We see faces and spaces, real and imagined. Dreamers, drinkers, riders at moonlight, heroes of the stage, the bar, the beyond. Where they align, perhaps, is in their capacity for night vision, for seeing where others don’t. Because they stayed up longer, dared to spend more time looking, or not looking away.