Covid has spurred a prolonged reevaluation of the way we interact with our surroundings, with the virus’s rapid mutation prompting a near-daily restructuring of our engagement with public space. In “By Hand, on Foot,” Vlatka Horvat examines the pandemic-induced precarity of the relationship among the body, the objects it encounters, and the environments it inhabits. The exhibition centers on To See Stars over Mountains, 2021, an ambitious fleet of 365 works on paper, each of which documents a single day in 2021. For all of them, Horvat first took a photograph on the daily walk permitted during London’s lockdowns, then altered the image manually, cutting out and repositioning trees, blocking out buildings with construction paper, or collaging new images atop the prints. Like Luciano Perna’s photographs of plants or David Adika’s “Running Diary” series, To See Stars over Mountains reflects Horvat’s attempt to grasp her changing relationship to her surroundings at a deeply destabilizing moment.

This line of inquiry continues in the twenty-four-minute video Until the Last of Our Labours is Done, 2021, which considers the human impulse to control our environment and the objects that populate it. The footage shows a group of individuals chasing and corralling scraps of wood and plastic through a field. One woman struggles to make a wheel out of a length of hose try as she might, she cannot will the material to perform something beyond its capabilities. Another uses a piece of foam as a measuring device for movement, repeatedly placing the strip on the ground and stepping over it

The debris from Until the Last of Our Labours is Done reappears in What Is on the Ground and What Is in the Sky, 2022, a site-responsive installation in the gallery’s front room. The foam strips have now been taped together to form an unwieldy strand. It loops loosely around a piece of wood, an echo of a nearby bicycle rack. It is as if the gallery space offered Horvat a respite from the unyielding uncertainties of nature, a site where the artist can directly orchestrate the interactions between the body and its surroundings.

— Jonah Goldman Kay