City Sameness

 

The photographs that the show is based around were taken in New York City, but that’s both central to and beside the point. Let’s first consider the screens, close up, blown large: these are descendants of the electric bulb advertising that Manhattan entrepreneurs were the first to make famous in the late nineteenth century, lighting up Broadway with words and images up high. Then came the invention of neon in the early to mid twentieth century, tubed across Paris, Tokyo. Today, travelers' passages from Chengdu to Riyadh join Times Square as showcases of digital billboards. Airports, similarly, are mazes of LED screens, showing how the cities themselves are merely terminals in one enormous airport. Indeed, both cities and airport terminals tend to be challenging to navigate, overly mapped while counterintuitive, brimming with bids for travelers’ attentions. But somehow today’s urban workers, especially those in art and tech, eke it out between these hubs, increasing their production output, leaving trails of data in their sleep-work pods, doing what they can to evade war and taxes.

 

There is a trouble with these works beyond their murmuring artifacts (the occasional dead pixels, shaky-looking grids, and warped dimensional fields). The question is: why document anything when the reality around us has become so drab, cruel, and uninspiring? Grabowsky’s response is simple, classic. He turns inward, but not to the vicissitudes of the self, as the romantics did in their masochistic pursuits of the sublime, and not to the register of dreams and automatic emissions, as the surrealists did. Grabowsky’s inner turn is to a procedural element of human perception, a playfully empirical mode of considering the ways a thing in the world could appear. These prints of screens are constructed in formats that are neither uniform to one another, thus not entirely typographical, nor independently commandeering or figurative, authorial. In White Arches appears ice cream at a 90-degree angle, like cement; auburn, orange, and black shimmer as a diagonal sweep in the eponymous Treadmill. These works are like clues to other screens not pictured: carefully produced views from askance, genteel and glad to be arbitrary.

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In the three works that feature a window, we start with WS(1), the 12 x 18 cm print depicting a vault-like contraption which is itself sloppily formed, a metal frame bolted at arbitrary points into tan bricks, blocking off an azure window from which a glare emanates. A ball of light, perhaps a leak in the lens, gleams at the bottom left. Next, one might suppose by a seeming honing-in on the object, is WS(3), a photograph of a window that looms closer to the visual apparatus, straighter than WS(1), and excluding a horizon. WS(3) is the functional "headshot" to the "candid" snapshot of WS(1). Not only is the composition of the image more level and symmetrical than in WS(1), but the window-gate thing itself is less confounding: the bolts generally match the inlays of the bricks, and there are fewer stray marks across the object. The quality of the light from the window in WS(3) is soft, nearly ambient. The work seems to evoke a quality present in photos of people used for standardized ID purposes: people, cut off at the neck, gaze at a nothingness; the window also sees nothing, because it does not see.

 

Jump to WS(14), in which gate and window make no appearance, and rather than glass or iron, a swooning pattern of bricks populates the center. Extending from the sides of the bricks are lines etched by Grabowsky’s hand, extending horizontally and smeared vertically, laid out as if diagramming the very function of bricks. Where there may have initially been an inkling of an impulse about the strangeness of the gate at the window, the mystery of the two sources of light, and lastly the desolation of such a bounded, hapless object, by now this impulse has been popped, with, say, the ghost of a pencil, and the “why” question eclipsed through Grabowsky’s particular, humming way of arranging.

 

These details are obvious, nearly irrefutable—but not entirely so. Amid our simultaneously convoluted and homogenizing cityscapes, we are presented with some instances where sameness relays its degrees of difference. From the screens to the windows, including a kind of screen which is not illuminated nor digital but rather made of thick metal, Grabowsky suggests that sight can be a means of unfettering, even if it does not appear so.

 

 

Exhibition text by Lauren Lee, New York City