The works of Christian Giroux and Daniel Young, Ben Van Dyke, and virocode are an atmospheric grouping of distinct works with shared properties and sensibilities. Each in some fashion play with a sense of space and time, share certain formal properties—obvious and subtle—and are realized as both elegant and emphatic. There is something banal in the origin of all the works, yet they all transform the ordinary with rigorous, iconoclastic gestures.

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Giroux and Young's 50 Light Fixtures From Home Depot is a 35mm film loop depicting an empty room at 1:1 scale illuminated by a single light fixture. With the projected light the only light source, their rooms emerge from total darkness for ten seconds, then four seconds of darkness, then the next fixture of a different style and position. The space in which the viewer views the work is the sculpted object that transforms before (and around) the viewer. It is a work reverent toward the space and the moment in which it is realized.

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virocode's (Peter D'Auria and Andrea Mancuso) current series Evolving Moisture—presented here with one photograph and a video loop—originates in a common object and element. Water balloons against a black background are popped in sync with the camera shutter through an ad hoc audio cue fed through an old cassette player. It is a work that is blunt about its metaphors—the evolved moisture, before the balloon is popped, is pure potentiality, unrealized. If one considers the ballooned forms as figurative stand-ins—and virocode's practice has often referenced the body and, anyway, we are comprised mostly of water—there is a reminder in the work that possibility is everpresent and in perpetual flux.

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Benjamin Van Dyke's installations are improvised iterations of a highly personalized visual language, whose forms are often drawn from those of typography. Van Dyke has referred to the "cryptic autobiographical rants" that reside within the work and while it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to decode the autobiography or discern a narrative, it does not delute from the work's emotive impact. The tropes of typography—bolding, size, italics, spacing—are used to the same purpose of emphasis as in a conventional usage of the form. It is as easy to discern desire and longing in the work as it is to recognize the visual play of forms. If the work contains an inherent ambiguity, Van Dyke is not articulating this as a problem or a quandary to be solved, but an affirmation, a zone of ambiguous comfort.





All the works share a banality of origin and the artistic gestures applied are concise and wholly apparent—even obvious, perhaps—but the individual and collective effect is to summon up an atmosphere. Different things, from different directions that, strangely enough, do similar things. Alternately playing with space, time, form, and the viewer's relationship to the work, they each distill the moment into itself and articulate it as a space of possibility.

Some publications related to this event:
September, 2010 - 2010
October and November, 2010 - 2010