Eponanonymous

This group exhibition at Lisa Cooley on Orchard Street was impressive for its delicate curatorial step, treading sensitively into areas where others often stumble. Much of the work here functions by suggesting what it is not, by implying the meaningfulness of what is missing; the leftover materiality is inert, sensuous, and longing. The exhibition title, taken from a song by The Fall, sets the dynamic up: “gut of the quantifier” points towards the visceral power within abstract ordering systems, and yet the phrase remains ambiguous since its literal meaning can only be a nonsensical dead end.

The best work here splinters in two directions at once: simultaneously dumb in its literal simplicity and sophisticated in its shifting layers of consequences. Matt Sheridan Smith contributes a five-part work titled “According to speculative logic (five portraits)”, in which engraved portraits from international currency have been enlarged to approximately life-size, and the prints covered with the same silver ink that one finds on lottery tickets. The works are completed when the artist scratches off enough ink to reveal the portraits beneath. The scratching hand creates a drawing, but in a cunning reversal of the Johnsian-Twomblish impulse, the free scribbling removes the silvery layer, and is meaningful for what it reveals, rather than what it obscures. These works cohere very tightly, drawing together the paradoxes that inform the institutional enshrinement of great national figures on currency, and what that ultimately means to a citizenry reduced to games of chance in pursuit of said currency.

Matt Sheridan Smith
According to speculative logic (five portraits), 2008
inkjet prints and scratch-off ink
5 parts framed individually, 12 x 9 inches

Lisa Oppenheim’s slide projection work “The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else” takes a humorous gesture and twists it into an elegaic tribute. The viewer sees a collection of slides of a lone arm holding snapshots of sunsets up against a real landscape, aligning the images so the photograph replaces the actual setting sun. The absurdity is winning, demonstrating both the desire to capture a beautiful natural phenomenon on film, and the utter inadequacy of the resulting image to function as a stand-in for the real experience. But the twist comes with the knowledge that these particular sunset photos were all taken by soldiers in Iraq, and Oppenheim is re-enacting the setting suns in a New York landscape. The humanity that embeds in these images is effective, while steering clear of any clumsy political declarations.

Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez shows four collages, made by cutting out auction catalog photographs of furniture and layering the resulting negative spaces. They dissolve into abstraction, pictures of “the context of no context”; however, for this viewer, they hew too closely to similar collages by Matt Keegan, whose technique is more complex and rewarding for its inclusion of the human figure, and all the accompanying psychological trauma that brings.

Barb Choit includes five photographs on plexi, which document the gradual illumination of a space that results from turning on lamps. In each image, another lamp goes from off to on, and the picture passes from darkness to “blown out”. Together they amount to a poetry of the literal. It takes a specific intelligence to recognize how nearby the logical conclusions of some thought processes are; the idea that a photograph is about capturing light (or more keenly, capturing just the right amount of it) is played out with the dumbness of scientific discipline, to compelling effect.

As a whole, the exhibition maintained a humility in its scale, materiality, and themes that was very inviting, allowing one to dwell on the missing modifiers that ultimately gave this show its charge. After all, we all know that quantifiers are all brains and no guts, and yet something in our experience tells us the infinitesimal gaps between numbers hold a universe of truth.