...in abberant deliberation ... exhaust from ...
28.11.08 - 17.01.09
Opening January 27th, 2009 / 6-8pm
Slife will be exhibiting a new suite of giant enlargements of fictionalized historical newspapers printed on mirror. At first glance, the works might strike us as some type of opulent commemorative object. Yet, the question of what these works are commemorative of is left decidedly open. While they may have pulled us in with promises of clarity, what the mirrors deliver is something completely unexpected – just read the headlines: "SLIPSTREAM WHERE THE TV USED TO GO", "RESURRECTION STRUGGLE -OVERTURES CONSIDERED IN ABBERANT DELIBERATION ", "EXHAUST FROM EXCESS ITS OWN ENTITY", "NEW VEGAS BREED IN SUBMISSION".
The physical presence of the work – composed of shining surfaces, stark framing, high contrast, looming installation, and serial repetition – stakes claim to a certain kind of authority. The content of the images, with found photographs and headlines using interpretive licence of the English language, reinforce this; the newspaper is boldly called "The World" and the photomechanical enlargement of the imagery might make us think that the art is free of subjectivity. Like most commemoratives or memorials the work appears to hold answers. Yet, like the artist’s Dada and Pop predecessors, Slife has created an artwork that asks more questions than it answers. Instead of seamless recollection, we get incongruous accumulation. Instead of historical clarity we get delirious uncertainty. And instead of didactic instruction we are free to take aesthetic pleasure in the work's overabundance of mercurial logic and aleatory humor.
As a counterpart to the rest of the exhibition, Slife has chosen to install an original letter from writer Norman Mailer to William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker Magazine. At the time, Mailer was working on a book of poems to be published without credits or index, and was seeking the cooperation of the magazine. The letter might be said to function as another sort of mirror – one that points back towards Slife’s own methodology. Leaving us with one more fragmentary sign in an endless space of reflection.
-Daniel Lefcourt