At
Taymour Grahne Gallery this month,
two artists explore the threat of collapse, creating works that hover on the
brink—between order and chaos, structure and disintegration, the physical and
immaterial. In “
Parallel
Realms,” Iraqi-Kurdish artist
’s
large-scale site-specific installation forms a towering structure of white
ladders against a wall, evoking the mountains, pyramids, Ziggurats, and ladders
of Kurdish folklore. The haphazardly arranged construction appears to defy the
laws of gravity, suggesting an imminent breakdown.
His black-and-white paintings and works on paper employ the same
vocabulary, but in two dimensions. In dense fields of cross-hatched black and
white paint, undulating forms seem to emerge and disappear again, recurring pyramidal
structures to draw their substance from the surrounding environment, and meld
back into it. The terrains in Siti’s work—both two-dimensional and
three-dimensional—refer to the topographies of his native Kurdistan, as well as
forming a metaphor for the fragile and uncertain future of his homeland, and
the weak foundations of Iraq’s reconstruction.
Similarly, in
’s “
Surface
Tension,” several rudimentary sculptures include cinder blocks balanced
precariously on plywood boards. Escoto explores the tension between flat and
physical forms, and between analog and digital, reversing the traditional
relationship of image to subject so that the three-dimensional takes its cue
from the two-dimensional. He presents manipulated Polaroid photos—resembling
computer-generated collages—which he creates by shooting through hand-cut
stencils and filters to abstract the view through his lens so that patterned
surfaces and geometric objects appear to float in space.
In the gallery, Escoto’s sculptures sit on decorative and textured
plinths—some, like one of the gallery walls, are colored to create an ombre
effect. The resulting works—both two- and three-dimensional—recall virtual
realities where experiences of depth and flatness overlap, merge, and then
diverge once more. Escoto’s three-dimensional works resonate playfully with his
wall works, producing tension between the perception of permanence and
ephemerality. Like Siti’s works, Escoto’s occupy a realm of in-betweenness;
they are neither one thing nor another. Both challenge us to find stable ground
and orient ourselves in shifting, frail, or uncertain terrains.