November 15 to December 21, 2013

Jack Hanley Gallery
327 Broome Street
New York City, 646-918-6824

NEW/USED/WET/BROKEN, the debut solo exhibition of Jeff Williams at Jack Hanley Gallery, features work that tests its own structural or material vulnerabilities. Williams, an artist who divides his time between Brooklyn and Austin, Texas, highlights and isolates various scientific processes behind physical degeneration. His intricate sculptural installations (all 2013) are composed as chemistry and physics experiments. Going beyond illustrating the effects of age and erosion, many of his works activate entropic processes and house the ingredients of their own undoing. The show consists of eight pieces ranging from a twenty-foot monumental steel column to a photo printed on newsprint, to floor sculptures, wall propositions, and video.

In #13, a two-foot-long aluminum I-beam protruding from the wall about four feet off the ground, looks sleek with a single buxom wine glass hanging upside down by a wire stemware rack attached to its underside. The I-beam is bent just enough to perfectly curve around a one-inch-thick threaded metal rod that buttresses it from the floor. Williams has coated the wine glass with liquid gallium, a camouflaged threat, as gallium’s smooth silvery sheen mimics the surface of the aluminum. Gallium and aluminum are in the same periodic group (called Group 13), but gallium “attacks” aluminum—it is so highly corrosive to some metals that it can weaken or dissolve them. In #13, these elemental enemies are held together in risky proximity so that the glass endangers its own aluminum support.

Oxidation Table is a six-foot-long metal fabrication table that was found by the artist this summer on the Skowhegan campus in Maine. It’s composed of a rebar frame supporting 18 rusty steel slats, upright and spaced at regular intervals. The table’s heavily rusted surface is friable and brittle and the top edges of the metal slats have been eaten away into craggy, fingerlike formations. The rows of steel rails resemble miniature ruins or models of early Richard Serras. Three slats are so warped by corrosion that they no longer lay flat in the table’s slotted base, but wrench upward into dramatic arcs.

Multiple times a day, gallery personnel spray the table with a solution of hydrogen peroxide so that the piece continues to degenerate over the course of the exhibition. Because the slats are made of untreated metal, the surface begins to bubble right away and one can watch the oxidation process happen within minutes. The work spotlights the high degree of technology built into everyday materials and brings to attention the fact that most of the metal in our built environments is chemically engineered (galvanized, coated, blued) to resist the natural processes of oxidation and material decay. On a subsequent visit to the gallery, I found that a large section had broken off one of the rails. As the structural integrity is further compromised, the table becomes a kind garden to rust and its rich, powdery red-oxide pigments. Flaking pieces of rust that range between Indian and Venetian reds, siennas, and umbers continually reveal a fresh layer of cool gray steel underneath, waiting to be disintegrated.

Cibolo Creek is a floor sculpture that juxtaposes old and new, and human interference with natural processes. The work consists of a shiny yellow blowtorch fitted into an upright steel slab, facing a limestone fossil—a pairing that bridges the primordial with the contemporary and creates a strange visual approximation for a large span of time. The opposition of these two objects also plays with thermal decomposition. According to gallery staff, Williams lights the torch during impromptu performances in the space, exploiting a chemical reaction that happens when the limestone is heated. Breaking the 60 million-year-old Texas fossil into calcium oxide and carbon dioxide, the flame causes it to sputter and spew ancient debris onto the gallery floor, later cleaned up by gallery staff.

Chemical reactions and other unseen mechanisms yield striking physical changes in raw materials. In his art practice Williams repeatedly asks “Why?” all the way down to the atomic level. The artist’s embedded research adds conceptual drama and playfulness to works that are formally inscrutable. There’s a wonder and sensitivity in testing a material’s range and resiliency—that aluminum, for example, can be formed into a weight-bearing I-beam, or broken down by another metal or, in another sculpture, extruded as a foam. Williams is attentive to details, like the exposed bluish seams that bisect each of the two twenty-foot-long torqued building ties in Column, or Cibolo Creek’s interdependent, propped components, which seem to perfectly anticipate one another. Delicate decisions like these ensure that the sculptures’ experimental and procedural components are not deadened, but incredibly vivid.

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September 5 to October 06, 2013
327 Broome Street, between Bowery and Chrystie Street
New York City, 646-918-6824

A chorus from acclaimed Indie Rock band The New Pornographers that goes “It came out magical, out from blown speakers” is testimonial to moments when music is transcendent despite technical glitches. Simultaneity of broken equipment and sonic pleasure is one that Bjorn Copeland, of the musical collective Black Dice, must know intimately as it is one that he embodies perfectly in BD Mix, (all works 2013) a Yamaha amp oozing black polyurethane foam.Call it abject synesthesia, this is the perfect totem for his group’s embrace of the broken, distorted, noisy, chaotic, and experimental aspects of music-making.

It also seems like the sort of thing which a certain type of misanthropic teenage musician, presented with an irredeemably broken amp and a can of polyurethane foam would immediately seize upon–not as “Art” per se, but as the type of Dadagesture that kids who have never heard of Dada might embrace for the thrill of being weird. Copeland’s execution has just enough restraint and self-consciousness to allow these narrative associations without undermining the basic purity of his gesture. Some naysayers might argue that they’ve seen quite enough of Marshall (or Yamaha) amps in contemporary art, but let’s face it. Marshall stacks are, in fact, pretty cool.
Other pieces here also take failure and brokenness as a starting point. Not in a striving “Fail better” Beckett sort of way but more like its reverse. As the great filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky said: “Failure isn’t anything, it just means changing paths.” The disassembled and frayed parts of a large 6 foot wide balsa wood glider balanced, somewhat haphazardly, in a white five-gallon bucket undermines any functional “lift” the plane might be capable of, yet it achieves a Brancusi-like kind of sculptural lift. The slight flare of the casually balanced parts feels perfectly ascendant if, also, awkward: more like a ragged aeronautical flower, perhaps, than a plane – despite the irony that the air-craft is taking a nose-dive.

The dingy, abject, and ad hoc mood of these pieces is more of-the-street than of-the-studio: a Bushwick flaneurial revelling in oddball sidewalk finds. Take, for instance, a found image of a galaxy with a jokey exclamation mark thought ballooned on it. Next to it is a rolled up flag that looks like a firecracker, a metaphor for the Big Bang that contains enough mystery to resist its own jokey bathos. His 2-D work also engages a line between meaning and form as he reconfigures text almost to the point of unreadability, the letters taking on the look of some imaginary Semitic language.

A Dunkin’ Donuts ad for tuna salad on bagel in Remnant Screen IV demonstrates another type of communication breakdown. In one swift gesture of appropriation, Copeland succeeds at precisely defining the essence of his sensibility: a pop sheen that manages, almost against the odds, to be more off-putting than it is ingratiating. In fact, it reverse the terms: for all the advertising know-how brought to bear on the problem of selling Dunkin’ Tuna Bagels, they still seem oddly not-great. “Epic fail,” as the kids say. But as a trashy bit of pop detritus hovering on a fragment of black hexagonal screening, it’s perfect.

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