Mind the Gap
Mind the Gap, a group exhibition at Kent Fine Art, is rife with framed, cream and gray, rectangular works which anchor unruly neighboring pieces
Anne Sherwood Pundyk / The Brooklyn Rail
01 Feb, 2012
Mind the Gap, a group exhibition at Kent Fine Art, is rife with framed, cream and gray, rectangular works which anchor unruly neighboring pieces displaying buckled textures, blurred resolution, or smoky graphite diffusion. This deadpan order aesthetically controls the show鈥檚 mood of generalized social and political anxiety. Overshadowed in the artworld by Damian Hirst鈥檚 multi-national polka-dot painting juggernaut, the show nevertheless connects the dots between 20th century global events. Free market formats such as those used in precise ink on paper鈥攚orks by Mark Lombardi and Fernando Bryce鈥攑ointedly portray U.S. governmental money laundering and the Jewish holocaust, respectively. Splashes of red alert us, in photo-based images by Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton and Alfredo Jarr, to the consequences of war, social protest, and selective human erasure. Most haunting of all are two pieces with sound, although one is exhibited silently. A video transfer of Joseph Beuys鈥 filmed performance, 鈥淔ilz-TV鈥 (1966/1970), fills the gallery with a banal German news report as the artist abuses a rabbit-eared felt television. Seen, but not heard, is Dennis Adams鈥 鈥淟ullaby鈥 (2004) based on an Eric Clapton record found inside the prison cell of RAF leader Andreas Baader after his alleged suicide in 1977. These works and Heidi Fasnacht鈥檚 panoramic photomontage, 鈥淟ondon Blitz鈥 (2011), most palpably situate the individual within our nuclear era as if across from us in the mirror.