Travess Smalley
Foxy Production
623 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
Runs through May 30, 2015
What’s on view: scanned and altered flowers and abstractions printed on aluminum; a sci-fi short story; and an artist’s book with 1,384 drawings
Corinna: A quick glance in the gallery, and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with several super-shiny, Skittles-colored, digitally rendered prints of that most classic art subject matter: flowers. Get closer, and what had just a moment ago looked like a black border framing each of the panels now reveals itself to be the gap between a scanned book page and the edge of the scanning bed. All these panels look nice enough, but that could be their downfall: in this day and age, how important is to paint nice-looking flowers?
One clue to answer the “Why flowers?” question might be found with “Bloom,” Smalley’s short story accompanying the exhibition. Told in third-person, the nameless, male protagonist lives in a near-future world where all data is saved into the cloud or inside organic material, like a flower. This solitary individual prefers to back up his own files, both for political and personal reasons.
For the political, he sees keeping his own data as one of the few reserves left, where corporations cannot tread. “Cloud computing was supposed to offer a solution, but the horror stories of millions of terabytes of data inexplicably wiped yearly belied the utopia the companies promised, and he knew enough not to trust it,” reads one section. Another: “What was left was a society of people living in a fractured present, with data only accessible in corporate controlled fragment.”
For the personal, he enjoys listening to old sound files, transferred from CDs and records for “the compression of his versions, the soft echoes in the treble…an effect that made them sound underwater. The ghostly aquatic artifacting was a treasure.”
If only there were a way to integrate the political and personal imperatives within the gallery, with the panels themselves. They’re already nice-looking aesthetic objects. When the day comes that an artist can bundle aesthetic, personal, and political issues—of data, surveillance, et cetera—into a work of art, that’s when we’ll find ourselves amid the best artwork of a generation. (I’m being a bit hyperbolic here, but still…)
Jesse Greenberg: Face Scan
Derek Eller Gallery
615 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
Runs through May 30, 2015
What’s on view: Several puffy, abstract paintings that look like they’re filled with colorful gel; sculptures assembled out of household-size objects in steel, sometimes coated with beads and materials that look like straw and resin; often, they’re outfitted with holes in them
Corinna: These artworks look like they come from the end of the world. Maybe it’s because I just saw Mad Max: Fury Road, the latest dystopian-survivalist film in the Mad Max series, but these broken, gooey objects seem to be made from recovered materials. What would art look like when the entire world has gone to shit? Greenberg’s exhibition poses an answer.
Some works were more successful than others, the paintings in particular. Not that they’re actually paint on canvas. (“Paintings without paint” is a trend that AFC’s Michael Farley picked up on in his review of NADA New York 2015.) “Body Scan 4,” 2015, looks like a long, maze-like trail formed by a worm-y creature—maybe one of those terrifying sandworms from Beetlejuice—bulging out of a chemical-filled waterbed. Some works read as omens, like in “Registration Mark 2,” 2015, where a resin circle and sunburst mysteriously emerge from materials seemingly in decay. The prettier works, though, like “Power Supply 3,” 2015, didn’t convey complexity so much as preciousness.
I kept on thinking about other artists that deal with materials in decay, from the bleached-on fabric of Sterling Ruby to anything by Eva Hesse. I bet these works will be a pain for conservators to deal with over the decades, as the materials become more volatile and decay.
Comments on this entry are closed.