Round 3: Matthew Brannon, Anne Eastman, Jorge Pardo, Adam Putnam / Jan 15 – 30

This last exhibition of three is concerned with dislocation. We are not only talking about the dislocation of the artwork itself, pulled from a greater group of likewise works and orphaned from its reference points; but artworks that have recorded a certain unspecific time and place. These spaces resonate through both the redundancy of a mechanical loop (of, for instance the video or MP3) and that of our familiarity to the subject. Through this they play mnemonically, creating psychological spaces in disjunction to the gallery space itself.

Anne Eastman's video Intention of the Device, shot in African Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, is transfixed on the kinetics of a mirrored mobile. Floating within the fixed screen shot, flatten circular postcard images of tribal masks intermix with Louis Kahn's ceiling armature passing each other in hypnotic near-collisions. Whereas Eastman's video acts like a moving collage, Matthew Brannon's Untitled cuts the sounds of the night in Park Avenue Armory and pastes them into the gallery space. The sounds hover in a silence that is periodically punctuated with footstep creeks on floorboards, swinging of doors, and the distant sounds of traffic from outside. The gallery space possesses the empty atmosphere of the old fort. Close your eyes and you are there, although you never have been. Much of that is same familiar association of foreign spaces is captured in the photographs of Adam Putnam. Putnam's photographs contain an eerie yet erotic spatial hesitancy of Cronenberg's videodrome. His deep offset colors pull us tightly in to their virtual screens.

Location does not have to be transferred to become malleable. Sometimes it is the objects in front of us that become camouflaged through their inherent function. Hanging in a row, Jorge Pardo's anemic dandelion lamps replace the standard gallery light fixtures of tracked fluorescents and square halogens. The white walls around the lamps fade jell blue as the objects light themselves. Outside Brannon's wall painting Before and After mimics a false door that offers no-entry upon our approach. The closed door as art object resonates as a fetish, like Duchamp's Étant Donnés it seemingly conceals secret spaces hidden inside.

Interim in Three Rounds is composed of three different exhibitions under one continual theme. Every two viewing weeks throughout the two-month time period (set aside time for a 10-day holiday break), the gallery will be reconfigured as simple guides to understanding the exhibition space itself. Taking positions of time, space, and light each round will examine the use of temporality either in an artwork's function or through its concept.

For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.