Things fall apart and tend to shatter. Like a plague that attacks every 7 years, these things often shatter in waves. When they reach a point of overwhelming stasis – stasis with the status quo, the rigidity of boundaries, the inability to improvise – they find a way to break through. A break with tradition marks the beginning of this cycle, and out of one thing is born another. The language then used to describe the fallen creates a new system, like a revised taxonomy or semiology.
Nikita Gale uses barricades, literally and figuratively, as both a historical artifact and a tool for protest, asking the viewer to reconsider the individual components of her work. Gale’s concrete dipped fabric and faux ladders are an unexpected assemblage that is neither as static in form nor as utilitarian in nature, as may seem. And across the way, an unfinished gallery wall is made into a jungle of metal, microphone stands and cords – you’re not allowed to enter even though she has broken through.
Pat O’Neill is perhaps best known as an experimental filmmaker whose works note the struggle between human civilization and nature. He uses humor regularly, and prefers to break from a quiet or easy presence in a space, opting for something a bit off the wall. An installation of 50 photographs, each their own collection of 81 eBay thumbnails, collected and categorized over 15 years, read like a visual braille. And what looks like a polished assemblage of parts, bursts through the wall and floor and plays with notions of high and low tech. In the corner, a frame has fallen apart.
Both artists emit a balance of poetic tension in this improvised composition called Fall Apart, on view through February 24, 2019.
