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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January 15 to February 21, 2016
1329 Willoughby Avenue, #2B, between Wyckoff and St. Nicholas avenues
Brooklyn (347) 925-1433

From the viewpoint of relativistic physics, space and time form a continuum as it is impossible to understand one without the other. The artists Lisa Gwilliam and Ray Sweeten add a third element to the melange, as evidenced by their collaborative name, “DataSpaceTime”—information. In their exhibition at Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, which consists of digital works, a video installation, and a series of prints, the duo explore all three themes that comprise their name: data is used as a raw material, a point of departure; illusionistic space is continually being created, fragmented, and re-created; and time is shifted between the past and the future or stretched towards infinity. These elements are encompassed by a larger focus on vision and the eye, an organ simultaneously augmented and hobbled by its digital prostheses.

A pair of two-channel digital installations, Oculus 1 (Annunciation) and Oculus 2 (Assumption) (both 2016), directly reference the altarpiece tradition in their titles and presentations. Each is a diptych presented on two LCD monitors hung side-by-side on the wall. The two panels of Annunciation are horizontally-oriented, a potential reference to Leonardo’s painting of the same name. The composition of Assumption’s swirling colors and shapes seems to recall Guido Reni’s Assumption of the Virgin (1580), as a “figure” made of negative space endlessly floats towards heaven with “arms” outstretched. These pieces look more like glitches than sacred scenes, however: divided into grids of shifting squares, they resemble the blocky picture from a scratched DVD, an overly-compressed video file, or a bad digital cable connection.

Like their sacred counterparts, these works have esoteric meanings that extend beyond superficial appearances. Using custom software created by the artists, the monitors are divided into grids of animated GIFs, each square being a fragment taken from a larger video of the World Trade Center PATH Station’s Oculus either under construction (Annunciation) or on the verge of completion (Assumption). The software shuffles these GIFs in time and space, creating a larger whole that is constantly in a state of flux. These pieces have no “present”: their fragments shift into the past and future or to other parts of the screen, allowing for a potential collapse of space and time into a single image while simultaneously frustrating any possibilities of an omniscient viewpoint. These themes are reiterated by another digital installation in the show, Night Watch, Night Vision (2016). Presented, this time, on a single monitor this piece, which uses the same technology, directly references the digital gaze, depicting the head of one of the artists (Gwilliam) wearing one or more pairs of military-grade night vision goggles. With access to this imagery being continually compromised by the temporal and spatial shifts of its presentation, its meaning meshes with that Oculus 1 & 2: when one can see everything, the limitations of human vision — bound to the present place and moment — may make it impossible to see anything meaningful at all.

While the diptychs and Night Watch suggest a kind of infinite vision that can see the past and the future at once, Vespers (2016), a video installation named after the evening offices of traditional Christian prayer, transcends such temporal limitations: according to the gallery’s checklist, its duration is theoretically infinite. The computer controlling the videos shown across six monitors randomly shifts each video feed back and forth in time, resulting in a lineup of images that is unique from moment to moment. The imagery itself, like the other works on view, involves the physicality of vision: the eyes of ghostly white figures dart around the screen or stare off into space. Portions of the videos are veiled by analog feedback, the swirling, colorful result of a mechanical vision apparatus trying to look at itself. In some shots the pupils and eyelashes are rendered transparent, exposing bits of a second image: eyes hidden behind the eye. If the eye can see everything, can it see itself? Or is vision, whether human, mechanical, or digital, haunted by physical limitations that preclude omniscient views of the world? Questions such as this recall a dictum of the Spanish seventeenth-century Jesuit Baltasar Gracián: “One requires eyes on the very eyes, eyes to see how they see.”

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