Eponanonymous

March 21-April 19, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, March 21 (7-10)

Nicholas Knight, Register: Domino Light Brown Sugar, 2008,
collage and pigment print on canvas, 11 x 8.5 inches

65GRAND is pleased to present Nicholas Knight in his first solo show in Chicago. His discursive blend of image and language, color and grayscale, and 2-D and 3-D work takes the form of smart, tragicomic photo-sculptures, existential abstractions and in-situ sentence diagrams.

Knight’s series of Registers focuses on the color test patterns found on the bottom of  commercial packaging, like Domino’s Sugar box flaps. He scans the flaps, creating color prints, which unravel the work of the registers by producing faulty color replicas of them. Knight then collages the actual box flap onto the prints, concretely exposing the futility of this process. Reveling in the disconnect between representation of a thing and the thing itself, Knight’s heady, mimetic work is tempered by witty playfulness, like the transformation of utilitarian sugar packaging into aesthetic eye candy. From there, the show caroms to antique picture frames, electrical outlets, grammatical wall drawing and Marcel Proust.

Knight Holds a BFA in Fine Arts and a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1998. In 2007 he was Artist in Residence at the Domaine de Kerguehennec in Bignan, France. He has had solo exhibitions at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco, California and Eugene Binder, Marfa, Texas. Knight will be present at the opening.

The inaugural pair of 65GRAND issued archival pigment prints, in an edition of twenty, will be available at the opening.

65GRAND
1378 W Grand Ave at Noble St. (entrance on Noble)
Chicago, Illinois
312-719-4325
65grand.com
EL: Blue line to Grand. Bus 65 Grand.
gallery hours Fri-Sat. Noon-5:30pm

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published an essay titled “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery”, in which he argued how the factors in the general milieu of a field of scientific research make it possible, and even likely, that multiple researchers will make the same “groundbreaking” discoveries at nearly the same time. That is, all of a sudden, a phenomenon is everywhere, waiting for diagnosis, and thus integration into the knowledge pool.

And so one comes to “Enantiomorphic Chamber”, the exhibition at NurtureArt in Brooklyn co-curated by Kevin Regan and Christopher Howard. Drawing both its title and its organizing principle from the eponymous work by Robert Smithson, himself an example of simultaneous (re)discovery, the exhibition presents a selection of artists working with asymmetrical, reflected figures. In their Smithsonian essay for the exhibition, Regan and Howard make some delightfully far-flung interpretive claims about what joins these works other than a common formal device. Most broadly, they identify two themes: sex/fighting/dance, and the “transcendental…grotto of miracles”. They marshal the support of Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and Mobius (he of the famous “Strip”) in constructing their analytical edifice. It’s great fun, and persuasive in its own idiosyncratic way.

Marc Travanti, East Siders X, 2007

Analytical edifices aside, what struck this viewer was the sudden awareness gained of the ubiquity of these types of images. Regan and Howard have kept a blog as a complement to the exhibition, in which they have posted nearly 250 artworks that fit their criteria. Furthermore, one can’t make it through a single commercial break in prime-time without seeing an ad (usually for cars, but then most ads seem to be for cars) that has divided the screen along an axis and flipped the image over it. Many of these are quite creative, and I wonder whether there is a place for them here. (The “grotto of mileage”, perhaps?)

There are three types of simultaneity at work in the show. And to accede to the ideas of Regan and Howard, I’ll willingly equate simultaneity (time) with ubiquity (space): after all, the point is the fourth dimension:

1. Smithson. His time has come (again). In fact, this show may arrive at the back end of the rediscovery of RS. Nonetheless, the dispersed practice he championed seems particularly well-suited to contemporary, mediated living. Recently, many artists and institutions have noticed this.

2. Reflected Figures. As noted above, this formal technique must carry a great deal of symbolic power for it to appeal to so many, across so great a range of visual arenas.

3. Everywhereness. The conceptual heart of the issue is that the enantiomorph wraps itself into a fully enclosed world. The visual implication is that there is nothing outside the picture’s edges. This suggests that its popularity is a defense against the decentralized, networked condition presently dislocating the identity of each individual: as if to say, “here’s an axis, in front of me, and the world spins around it.”

Back to Kuhn. Kuhn is flirting with the uncomfortable idea that personal discovery is still primarily socially determined. Such a notion seems particularly incongruous with the ideal of scientific truth (that is, the counter-intuitive claim that scientific truth is dependent on social conditions), but that was the particular genius of Kuhn’s thought. “Enantiomorphic Chamber” plays on this discomfort by suggesting that the impulse of the artist to place oneself at the center of an enclosed and self-confirming reality is the group-simultaneous reaction to being disconnected from the group itself.

Curator Vincent Honoré has brought together the work of ten artists in a group show titled “From a Distance” at Wallspace on 27th Street. The show title finds its most concrete meaning in the fact that all of the artists were born or presently live overseas. In a globalized artworld that finds New York at (or near) its center, this fact is of minor interest. Of greater interest is the show’s suggestion of the aesthetic connective tissue that joins these artists: each is engaged in his or her own attempt to give form to the “distance” that separates the physical embodiment of an artwork from both the intentionality of its origins and from its ability to successfully contain its own meanings once it is set loose in the world as a finished work.

Abigail Reynolds
Universal Now: St. Paul’s 1912 / 1965, 2006, 280 x 310 mm

This investigation is not a new one in art, yet its persistence suggests two things: even after being articulated by artists of earlier generations, it has not ceased being true; and that the specific dis-ease of this “distance” is equally pressing to the generation of artists in this exhibition (who were all born between 1966 and 1980). That is, it is not the job of artists to continuously produce new forms simply for the sake of forms, but instead to enunciate the specific forces fundamentally shaping contemporary experience. The persistence of distance as a central preoccupation, then, speaks perhaps to the ineffectuality of earlier art to displace the gnawing anxiety of disconnectedness from the collective consciousness of the artworld, and from culture at large.

Absurd stakes, perhaps, and stakes not to be accomplished in a modest group exhibition along this cobbled section of 27th Street. But there are many engaging works, and their various strategies form a catalog of ways to deal with the problem, from the philosophical to the political to the personal.

The work of Walead Beshty is foremost here, and is the umbrella beneath which the rest of the exhibition finds cover. The three pieces included - two Fed Ex sculptures and a large photograph - assert an impressive visual and conceptual clarity that gives way, more impressively, to nuance and complexity. For Fedex Large Boxes, Priority Overnight, Los Angeles - New York, Beshty made thick glass boxes the exact dimensions of the inside of a large Fed Ex shipping box, packed them directly inside the eponymous boxes, and shipped them to the gallery. The glass, cracked and nearly smashed in transit, is displayed in this condition, with the Fed Ex box acting as pedestal. Aside from being beautiful little post-minimal rectangular solids, the works reverberate in several directions. The glass (and the shipping boxes) bear the imprint of the distance traveled, translating space as both a geographical condition and as a commercial condition into a direct index “written” on the object. (In fact, it is only partially necessary to surround “written” with quotation marks, as the shipping labels on the boxes give it a purely literal sense, too.) This viewer does have an aesthetic quibble, however: since the work is so formed by the incidents of its transit, the rather fussy way that the glass and the shipping boxes were arranged one atop the other neutralizes some of the force of the conceptual detachment that is otherwise so persuasive.

Beshty’s other work is a large photograph. It is made by repeatedly folding a piece of photographic paper, exposing it to a directional light, developing the sheet so that the geometry of its folds creates a pattern of light and dark, and festooning it with a descriptive title that directs the image towards a strictly analytical identity. The affectation of the title (Fold (Directional light sources, 15 degrees and 165 degrees), December 23rd, 2006, Valencia, CA, Ilford Multigrade Fiber IV) acts as an interesting irritant. Aware that the image cannot inherently contain any forensic vestige of the pseudo-scientific conditions of its creation, Beshty must overload its title with that record instead. The steps in its creation taken together cohere into a meditation on the absurdity of expecting photographs to be unblemished carriers of the reality that informed their coming-into-being.

Moving from the philosophical to the personal, the artist duo Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund show a work titled All the Lovesongs. Two speaker wires emerge from beneath a closed door and plug into two speakers which have been joined together, face-to-face; a song, muted by the “closed loop” of the speaker cabinets, plays continuously. It creates an elegant form, with its imitation wood grain box, translucent wires, and muffled audio. As metaphor, it slides from the elegant to the poignant. No matter how closely and repetitively two entities clutch, an irreducible “talking over each other” transforms communion into confrontation.

Lastly, from the personal to the political: Abigail Reynolds [image above] shows works on paper from her ongoing series Universal Now. Two different images of the same public space, taken at different times, are cut and pasted together into a single image. The cutting pattern, reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s domes (and thus his idealized futurism), results in collages that suggest a type of social discontinuity. Since most of the visible pages that form the ground of the collages are taken from old published sources, the works begin with reference to a historical moment of shared political consciousness; interrupting each scene with an image of itself in the geometrically-erupting present subverts the nostalgia vested in the browning paper of the older pages. Sentimentality gives way to the rather brutal realization that the monumental architecture of the public square can continue to symbolize anew long after the political ambitions of any given generation have been extinguished, or worse, co-opted. It is worth mentioning, too, that these collages are beautifully made, and are quite ravishing as objects.

Not all the artists present work that functions as effectively as the above. Graham Hudson connects two tape measures and hangs them from the ceiling so that the beginning of their tapes meet at standard hanging height. After its pithy form, the piece lapses into a dull type of institutional critique. After all, things have to hang at some height. Michal Budny presents small architectural models made from modest cardboard. Their personal reference is too oblique and their method too familiar for the pieces to gain any traction.

Still, “From a Distance” presents a well-compressed look at strategies for coping with separation. After years of waiting out the celebration of frivolity that has gripped Chelsea for so long (not that it has passed), a renewed seriousness and engagement is staking out territory in contemporary art. Without the glamour or facile appeal of the attention-grabbing artwork out there, the audience for such work will always be smaller; but shows like this prove the validity of the concerns, and of the artists pursuing them.

Miguel Abreu Gallery presents a group of Eileen Quinlan photographs, open until December 9, down on Orchard Street.  Most of the works are from an ongoing series titled Smoke & Mirrors.  Those that do not bear this title are nonetheless very similar visually.  As a group, the work inhabits a narrow field, where its vulnerabilities are alternately convincing and disappointing.

The press release for the exhibition quickly points out that the prints are made from large-format negatives without digital intervention, “allow[ing] for slight details.” (Why this is possible with film but not digital escapes me.)  Certainly, the most engaging moments for this viewer are found in the black and white pictures, with their big ugly scratches and dust spots, enlarged to radioactivity-induced proportions.  In their play between dustiness and surfaceless-ness one finds the clearest statement of the absurdity of this non-referential photographic imagery.  Clichés come to the foreground:  scratches turn into Modernist drips, jagged planes of light and dark turn to Constructivist fantasies.  Are they suggesting a moral imperative?  It’s amusing to even be made to think of the question.

The Black & White Version of Smoke & Mirrors #233, 2007
Silver gelatin matte fiber print mounted on aluminum
40 x 30 inches

The photographs spar with the language in which they are couched (even though there is more floating like a butterfly than stinging like a bee).  “Smoke & Mirrors” gets right to the point, and I applaud the clarity of it:  in common usage, this phrase is used to mean a trick is taking place that obscures the reality of the situation, and likely that “there is no ‘there’ there”.  As this idea is forced to co-exist with the actual referents of the pictures - literally mirrors, their edges, and their reflections of themselves - a pleasant abyss swallows up the directness of the derelict materiality present in these images.

But a sense of insufficiency lingers.  The press release offers an over-heated and incomprehensible torrent of language that wants to send this work to the next level.  It doesn’t, and the jargony mess just bounces off these mirrors, set at skew angles to legibility, apparently.  What’s left unfulfilled for this viewer is a sense of the stubborn kernel at the center of the echo chamber.  Something has to generate the cry of “echo”, after all.  To stick a can of Goya beans into a couple pictures is rather a let down:  I wanted to see either a dogged insistence on the ultimate emptiness at stake (”there is no stubborn kernel”), or some surprising turn towards an actual materiality on the far side of depicted immateriality (”here’s your damn kernel”).  That what we get is a can of beans is just not that…thrilling.

Still, a lush color suffuses the gallery, creating a kind of Uta Barth emotional space which is seductive.  Abreu is doing an admirable job of cultivating a specific type of intellectual rigor in his programming, and this show provides enough rainfall for the month to keep things growing.  (Mixed metaphors are fun.)  This viewer looks forward to what comes after the smoke and the mirrors, both for Quinlan and Abreu.