Exhibitions
RAE YOUNG: SPIRIT PLAY
STATE Gallery + Studios at The Forge / 217 Willow St. August 21 - September 15th
Rae Young
The Forge is proud to present Spirit Play, a solo exhibition by Rae Young that navigates the shifting terrain between body and machine, protection and exposure, ancient artifact and digital landscape.
At Spirit Play’s core is this generative tension between technology and spirituality. Across the exhibition, Young assembles synthetic and organic matter—spray foam, netting, cords, fur, iron, hair, plastic, and shells—into objects that feel both ancient and speculative. These sculptural works draw equally from ritual and circuitry, channeling a lineage that stretches from prehistoric cave symbols to digital downloads.
Their delicacy is honored through ritualistic felting, piercing, and binding, processes that mimic both bodily pain and cathartic release. Materials sourced online mingle with foraged bounty, forming an elemental tapestry where sea and sky, fiber and plastic, flora and fauna, speak the same tongue.
Importantly, Spirit Play does not linger in binaries. It proposes a new kind of being—part ritual object, part signal transmission—where technology and spirituality are not in opposition but in union. What emerges is a hybrid form: embodied, protective, animated. This is not simply a critique or even observation of modernity, but an invitation to reimagine it—to see the digital as a site of devotion, a material through which new languages, new mythologies, and new anima might be born.
To mark this emergence, a corresponding performance from dancer Gordy Val and composer Jake Slipkovich will take place at both the opening and closing receptions—an activation of the work that gives breath and body to the themes of the show. Through movement, sound, and ritual gesture, the corresponding performance brings forth the hybrid entity Rae Young has conjured: a spirit that speaks through both code and cord, horn and signal, body and broadcast. Additionally cooperative is one of the exhibition's central works, Spirit Born in Code, created in technical collaboration with John Holmes, Director of New Media Nashville.
Join us August 21, 6pm-9pm for the opening of Spirit Play, and again on September 15 for its final invocation. See you there!
