December 15, 2017 to January 14, 2018
1329 Willoughby Avenue, #2B, between St Nicholas and Wyckoff avenues
Brooklyn, microscopegallery.com

Milk glass floats under a pendulum of light in New Grey Planet, one of Blinn & Lambert’s two title videos at Microscope Gallery, its effect both vivid and spectral enough to recall Francis Ponge’s assessment of the mollusk, “a being— almost a –quality.” Like Ponge, who wrote prose poems on subjects such as oranges, doors, and snails, the artists experiment with everyday objects (ping pong balls, rough-skinned fruit, a tennis racket) toward a personal, and intuitively precise language of things.

The exhibition hints at a narrative set in deep space but which can also feel, in Microscope Gallery’s cavernously dark gallery, like deep sea. A soundtrack of unnerving sounds – buzzers, clicks, what I think was a vacuum cleaner – emanates from the two monitor videos, New Grey Planet: Chapter 1 and New Grey Planet: Library. These videos bookend a series of installations, still life arrangements of found glassware and flimsy sculptures on glass tables, projected with blue and red light. The complex shadows they cast come to life when wearing 3D glasses, looming forward in some cases, flattening into a stark picture plane in others. Projected on the wall opposite from these installations is a large, dazzling CGI video, a completely different species of 3D.

Blinn & Lambert, the collaborative alias of Nicholas Steindorf and Kyle Williams, took their name in 2016 from matte and reflective surface options in Maya, a program capable of making virtual figments look hyper real. They’ve digested some of that program’s visual logic but use it sparingly. Only Doe, a Deer is made with it, its ambitious exploration of CGI all the more deliberate for being just one in a constellation of techniques. Both New Grey Planet videos work backwards: they look virtual but are not, an effect achieved in part by how the camera swivels under and around objects, giving the impression of a zero gravity space.

It’s a major trick how uncannily these floating objects resemble sci-fi set pieces: planets, moons, a space ship. In an exhibition abounding with double meanings, it feels more like a disposition than a gimmick. Every object has a shadow teeming with associative resonances. In one of the most strangely poetic moments of the exhibition, the shadow of a porcelain deer figurine is partially absorbed and erased by a stream of time-released water. An aquarium on the floor neatly collects the runoff. Turn around and see its double in the large CGI video, which conjures an eerily lifelike deer sipping water from a stream.

Painting, the oldest technology referenced in the exhibition, runs likes a current through all the work (its use of still life format, sophisticated attention to how color creates the illusion of space, and compositional inspiration drawn from Balthus’ masterpiece, The Mountain). Doe, a Deer foregrounds most explicitly how painting might help push the boundaries of CGI. A glittering, frenetic work, it’s the exhibition’s most painterly installment, channeling Stan Brakhage and early experimental film’s use of, and kinship with, abstract painting. Takeshi Murata’s charged phantasmagorias exist somewhere in its subconscious. It tells its story in color: squint one eye and the world turns red and black, the doe’s lavishly reproduced fur bending in the stream. Squint the other, and you’re submerged under water.

CGI is well placed to question the reality of nonhuman things, and some excellent work – Helen Marten’s “Evian Disease,” Hito Steyerl’s “Liquid, Inc.” and Kate Cooper’s “Rigged” come to mind – have been acts of artistic semi-philosophy. But CGI is also disposed to advance a received idea that (increasingly expensive) things are as worthy of ethical consideration as humans. The art worlds are too numerous to have one zeitgeist, but this is one of them (it’s one of the thrusts of Object Oriented Ontology, an influential philosophy within some corners of artistic creation). One friend called it “the talking toaster problem” after the 1987 prototypical-“Toy Story” animation, “The Brave Little Toaster,” in which the internal lives of objects tell a now-familiar story of old things fighting impending obsolescence. CGI versions of this in art today – creepy humanoids and pop culture pastiches – whether made from critique or conviction, risk taking complexity with objects for granted.

Blinn & Lambert’s objects are far from talking toasters. They’re more like deadpan performers from the age of silent film. And like Ponge before them, the artists find life in these everyday things through twin acts of observation and imagination. Expressivity isn’t a given – it’s a project.

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May 4 to 28, 2017
21 Ludlow Street, between Canal and Hester streets
New York City, centralbookingnyc.com

In Greg Lindquist’s paintings and wall mural, a mixture of coal ash and water—pictured as an immiscible swirl—serves as an avatar for a 2014 coal ash spill that contaminated drinking water in North Carolina and Virginia. Lindquist has addressed this particular spill previously, in exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art and again at The Southeastern Center for Community Change. Those two venues reflect strains of his thought (fine art, social action) that his installations attempt to conjoin.

The Library (curated by Diana Wege)  is a subsection of Central Booking, an amalgam venue that is part-bookstore, part-gallery. Lindquist is doing a lot within it. He has placed his oil paintings on two walls of a large, acrylic mural; the color-separated layers of its “swirl” image give it a graphic, digital effect. On the floor, Plexiglass vitrines of evidential coal ash follow the edge of the wall. An extensive booklet contextualizes the exhibition with interviews, essays by Lindquist and others, documentation of earlier exhibitions, a family history. Be warned, this is an exhibition with a lengthy backstory.

And yet, his paintings are not props by any means. Lindquist paints from projected photographs of the Dan River and Sutton Lake, two sites exposed to arsenic, cadmium, selenium and other pollutants. He’s attentive to the enlarged source images’ pixilation, which he renders here in Monet-like dabs. The colors look blown out and at times inverted, Fauvist for the end-days. According to Lindquist, the greenish color that underlies both mural and oil paintings is a Benjamin Moore finish, “Fresh Cut Grass.” “Toxic” is how previous viewers have described it, he tells me, and I can see why. It gives the paintings a hazy, eerie light. But he is thoughtful, troubled by the premise. “Part of the problem is that we don’t always know what toxic looks like. What is toxic?”

When I meet him, Lindquist is bussing a used tub of paint out to his car, saying he’d just completed the final touches the night before. These late decisions are idiosyncratic—including the low height of the exhibition’s smallest painting; the paper mâché covering a doorknob in the middle of his mural— that make the exhibition feel personal, inhabited. The coal ash vitrines along the floor reference Smithson’s “nonsite,” nature dislocated into the gallery. There is a corrective aspect to this gesture: dislocation is not simply a function of “aesthetic decisions,” as he writes of Land Art in a letter to Smithson in the exhibition booklet, but also political.

“Installation Art” is a short hand way of describing the method by which Lindquist brings his art into contact with environmental politics. I thought of the artist Sharon Hayes, who bends formats of protest, of assembly, toward a poetic-political art. I thought of Thomas Hirschhorn; an earlier iteration of “Smoke and Water” recalls Hirschhorn’s “Gramsci Monument,” inviting community participation. When I bring this up, Lindquist makes a distinction between paid workers and volunteer contributors. That Hirschhorn paid participants in the making of “Gramsci Monument” makes him uncomfortable (although “volunteer” is a fine line from “unpaid laborer,” hardly more ethical than paid labor).

Another, crucial difference is that Hirschhorn lives within the (Kurt Schwitters) Merzbau, collage-logic being the way much installation art has reconciled the conjunction of difficult parts. Lindquist has little merz to him. Nor does he share Hirschhorn’s ra-ra-ra mantra of “energy yes, quality no.” His work errs the other way: one is called in for meditation, or a quiet chat on a serious subject. “Smoke and Water” is admirably un-sensational, which may have less to do with artistic precedent than with Lindquist’s commitment to his subject and a refreshingly sincere conviction in art’s ability to affect social change.

Whether this is compatible with painting is an open question. It’s a premise of his work and a dare. Other disciplines than painting, particularly photography, sculpture, drawing, and video, have adapted with greater success to the Installation format. Painting does not play nicely with others; is not easily assimilated. When it’s simply a sign, it withers. But Lindquist’s paintings are adamantly complex. The most delicate is a small 8” x 10” painting of a coal ash “swirl” made with oil and glass bead. Look for it within the mural–its subtle placement took me close to ten minutes to notice it. The larger paintings are more challenging than beautiful, but full of the kinds of labored decisions that make his use of the space specific. He is a painter who leaves open the possibility of a discovery in paint, a chance encounter. The promise and challenge of Lindquist’s exhibition is the mixture of difficult, maybe impossible parts.

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