Time Out New York
Art Reviews
Xylor Jane, Robin Peck, Luke Murphy
By Noah Chasin
CANADA
Given the increasingly systems-based nature of everyday experience - music rendered in bytes on iPods, time reported in milliseconds thanks to digital watches - it makes sense that artists would turn to sequential analysis in their work. This show combines three such artists, all obsessed with the mathematical and the geometric.
Xylor Jane creates drawings for the OCD set. Each work begins with a set of arbitrary rules, often involving a Fibonacci sequence, that determine how the grid on her homemade graph paper will be filled in. In one untitled drawing she counts in five and fours: Every fifth square receives a large dot, every fourth a smaller one. As the images radiates outward from the center, Jane uncovers the unpredictable pattern produced by an apparently logical sequence. Robin Peck counters with utter simplicity. His two sculptural contributions here look like construction materials neatly stacked on the gallery floor - and, in fact, they are. Peck invites us to admire these accumulations of WonderBoard and Sheetrock as if gazing, from the firmament, upon the tops of enormous ziggurats. The implied gargantuan scale provides a wicked couterpoint to Jane's molecular-looking meanderings.
Reverend Luke Murphy, an MTV-employed computer wizard, fills the remainder of the gallery with a proliferation of data, equations and random words, scribbled on the walls like an even more manic John Nash. The results of Murphy's proofs are then rendered into computer code and projected in the back room. Cup of Loneliness, a whacked-out faux PowerPoint presentation, purports to quantify the experience of anxiety and, fittingly, the rapid flickering of its graphs agitates our nerves.
Published: January 6, 2005