There/Not There
Daniele Genadry, Adam Hayes, Alexa Kreissl, Christian Nguyen, Carlos Sandoval De Leon, Voshardt/Humphrey

May 14 – June 12, 2011

numberthirtyfive gallery is pleased to present There/Not There, a group show curated around the ideas of illusion, memory and permanence. An illusion being the distortion of the senses revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation, artists often employ this to create a seemingly 3 dimensional space on a 2 dimensional surface. Such is the case with the works in resin by artist Christian Nguyen. Working within a 2 dimensional plane, Nguyen stacks layers of architectural drawings sketched on clear resin, placing colorful dots in the expanding grid of each layer. Here he not only creates depth with point perspective, he also directly addresses the spiritual quality in the geometry of architecture by highlighting each drawings divine proportion. The end result is a room that you can seemingly walk into, even though it only exists in theory.

Alexa Kreissl’s video of water interacting with an architectural sculpture she created in Tilburg in the Netherlands uses the water itself to distort the view of the sculpture. In the first of two videos, the brightly colored metal seems to sway in its reflection on the stilled water’s surface. In the second, the moving water acts as a funhouse mirror to distort and change the sculpture into larger and smaller parts that exist simultaneously.

Daniele Genadry’s work addresses the faults in our unconscious perception. Working from photographs, she selectively highlights or deletes information. With each repeated image, what was very apparent in one view becomes less so in another and so on. Each piece alone reminds us that memories are not perfect recordings but improvised performances where what we believe to be vivid and accurate is in reality a reconstruction of the idea of a place or event.

Adam Hayes’ works discuss the trickery inherent in artifice. Selecting imagery from high fashion and Vegas casinos, he highlights the reconstruction of classical architecture and treatment of drapery, revealing only small bits. Holding true to his sources, or as a deeper critique of the concept, he willingly reveals this grandeur to be simply a flimsy promise, a notion that lies just out of our grasp that if we were to attain it would dissolve in our hands. The drawings hint of something concrete and extravagant but deliver nothing but a thin veil.

Carlos Sandoval De Leon is an artist that explores the distance that exists between the creator of an object and its user. It is in this space that the objects articulate their own deeper meanings through careful staging and juxtapositions. Although his subject matter generally involves specific cultural groups, his aesthetic language draws greatly from the unadorned expanses of minimalism. Unlike so much current art that is to inform, and responds exclusively to, a mediated popular culture, De Leon is more interested in exploring the contexts in which peripheral or immigrant cultures originate and how they function before they are appropriated by the structures of capital.

Robyn Voshardt and Sven Humphrey’s video Still Silent is a a minimalistic ode to the visual (and mental) space between human and cinematic perception. A viewer’s eye is repeatedly drawn to newly-formed snowflakes cast adrift in midair. An ephemeral scenario becomes convincingly concrete for one moment, as the eye of the camera fixes on a single free falling flake. Then transfixed time and motion’s trace slip deceptively back to their repetitive loop.