Entering the David Zwirner gallery at 52 Walker Street, one is immediately
met with the artificiality of the exhibition experience. Like much of the framed work
on display, the space of the exhibition itself does little to hide its artistic
fabrication. Many of the walls are covered with images that seem to represent an
artificial space beyond
the walls of the gallery; as if to create the illusion
that these walls are invisible (fig. 1).
But unlike a classical landscape painting
or mechanically-reproduced image of the past - traditions which have leveraged their
naturalism, via perspective, visual verisimilitude, to convey this illusion - the
walls at 52 walker deliberately display the artificiality of their construction.
Pieced together with what looks to be individual sheets of A5 printer paper
gaff-taped to the walls, these images - gridded by the white margins that come
with contemporary consumer-grade printing devices - offer a distinctive, postmodern
reflection on the experience of looking out
constructed by classical landscape
paintings (fig. 2),
and more pertinently, the images abundant in today's visual
culture, particularly as it exists in the realm of the digital (fig. 3, 4).
Even the more discreet elements of the exhibition space showcase this constructed
quality. For instance, at the center of the gallery is an inner room where the
main video piece, Baby Blue Benzo, is shown on loop. Unlike the
smooth white walls of the rest of the gallery space (typical of most modern
museums), individual sheets of drywall - and the very screws holding them in place - are not made
to be hidden (fig. 5). Like the landscape
images, the construction of this
inner room (viewed from the outside) reveals not only the artificiality of the
space, but the labor behind creating such a continuous gallery experience.
Gallery
