Elek's lamp uses real candles and employs lens and glasses of water to throw light around the room. One of the glasses is shaped like a pair of lungs. The metal rods that suspend the lenses, the glasses, and the candles are wedged into what looks like a tree trunk. Wax from the candle drips down the sides. The lenses magnify the light from the candles, which throw the shadows every which way. I'd really like to see this thing in the complete dark.
As in Also: An Alternative Too is guest curated by Brooklyn artist, writer, and curator John Drury and serves as a followup to The Other Glass: An Alternative History, a show he put on in New York City earlier this year. As in Also brings together 12 artists who push the boundaries (and expectations) of what glass as a medium can do. Though group shows can sometimes feel a little uneven, this exhibition is cohesive, a unit. What I'm saying is that it's fun.
I'm not sure that I have a lot to say about this Robbie Miller's "BIG BLUE" other than, I like it a lot. I like looking at it from this angle—that blue. What it does in actual, tangible space (look at its shadow) and how the color appears on paper, next to white, under those bright lights. From my view, the two objects are speaking to each other.
Buster Simpson's "TIPPING PØINTS ALL IN A ROW" makes me anxious! When I walked through earlier with Traver Gallery director Sarah Traver, she told me that these are individual glasses that Simpson crafted to lean precariously to the side. They are full of actual water. I tried to capture the rainbow that's splayed out from all that refracted light, across all those glasses lined up in a row.
Brooklyn-based artist Amy Lemaire's digital-on-aluminum prints immediately reminded me of those images generated by the DeepDream Generator, an artificial intelligence program which was initially "invented to help scientists and engineers to see what a deep neural network is seeing when it is looking in a given image," but eventually turned into a means of creating weird psychedelic art. Full of dog eyes.
Lemaire's work is less frightening and devoid of any uncanny valley, but similarly disorienting and beautiful. The aluminum gives the work a dull sheen that you can almost see yourself in, a texture that gives the image a layer of artifice. She created these images by putting a handmade lens (held by a 3D printed case) over her camera and going out into the world and shooting her surroundings. Each photo has the appearance of some AI-generated portrait but completely made by a specific human who lives in Brooklyn.
All the other artists in the show are similarly wonderful and strange and include Scott Darlington, Eli Hansen, Robbie Miller, Jerry Pethick, Brian Pike, George Sawchuk, Morgan Peterson, Leo Tecosky and Simon Klenell. I'm going to leave you with Megan Stelljes's "Party Banana." I wonder what it's about.
As in Also: An Alternative Too is up until July 27 at Traver Gallery.
