Parent Company is pleased to present Slush, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Imogen Brent and Max Popov. Bringing together two distinct yet dialogically resonant practices, the exhibition explores systems of containment, loss, and the material and emotional structures that hold our histories.

Max Popov’s work orbits the vestiges of memory. Drawing on his dislocated family history, he constructs memorials to events that lack witnesses. In The measure of Love - slush (II) Max constructs a lightbox that illuminates a note by his late grandmother listing his birthdays through 2067.

Effectively absent and presumably deceased, Max knows little about his grandmother’s life as an artist in Russia. In 2021 they spoke over the phone for the first time. Despite not speaking the same language, a profound love was evident in their exchange. In 2023, Max asked a friend in St. Petersburg to ring the doorbell at her last known address. The only reply was silence.

Max also presents a quilt of glass solar panels. He purchased the entire, soon-to-be outmoded stock from a surplus supply store and has incorporated the material into several previous projects. This piece is an amalgamation of the remaining stock, which includes broken fragments that Max painstakingly reassembled; restoring them to working condition with copper foil and solder. Together the remnants become an illuminated memorial: fragile, beautiful, and radiant with accumulated energy and care.

Nearby Imogen Brent’s works interrogate the aesthetics of control and the concealment of vulnerability; they seek to be dishonest or deceptive by design. Her work plays with the affective duality of form—what she describes as "placing markers of softness or tenderness into harsh architectures." 

In Spillway, the sculptural form of a dock cleat is enlarged and split, suggesting both access and denial. Fabricated in steel, the once small, ancillary object—designed to tether a boat—is reimagined through a rigorous and obsessive process. Here, Imogen questions our pursuit of control and highlights the inadequacy of rigid, Cartesian systems to address complex, intimate problems.

This idea of restraint is echoed in tip of my finger, roof of my mouth, a work derived from drawings of agricultural tools like yokes and collars—instruments of control in the service of productivity. Recreated at a large scale, these forms confront the viewer with their unsettling physicality. Both Spillway and tip of my finger, roof of my mouth have a literal weight, which implies a sense of permanence and finality. In this way, Imogen makes a kind of monument that holds both elegance and violence.

Together, Imogen and Max navigate the terrain of Slush—a state neither solid nor fluid, where sentiment, memory, and matter blur. Their works inhabit this ambiguous space: between exposure and concealment, function and failure, power and lack of control. At this threshold, the discarded finds new significance. Slush invites us to consider what seeps through when boundaries fail to hold, and what meaning accumulates in the overflow.