Gaylen Gerber
One hour's drive west of Chicago sits the 7,000 acre Fermilab - a sophisticated scientific laboratory that attempts to persuade the universe to relinquish its secrets. The focal point of this research facility is an underground particle accelerator: a four-mile diameter steel tube encased in thousands of superconducting magnets. Here, physicists collide protons and antiprotons at the speed of light. The result of this particle annihilation is a momentary temperature so extreme that it is unequalled by anything generated in nature since the Big Bang.
Merging with RX Gallery, Chicago Project Room recently opened its new space in Wicker Park with work by Gaylen Gerber. I suppose one could draw an analogy between the collision of particles and the consolidation of two consequential galleries in a city whose commercial profile is alarmingly weak. But it's the abstract indirectness of Gerber's work that beckons the parallel with quantum thinking. Gerber's installation of three photographs in a deftly tweaked gallery environment initially appears under-installed and uncomfortably Minimal. But his work has always confused the 'seeing' of visual images and the 'evidence' of visual images. For example, we cannot 'see' the protons that slam around the Fermilab accelerator, but we know they exist because we can see their 'evidence', their debris. This is the abstract territory that Gerber mines. With photography, painting and interior design, he creates a space dominated by textuality and instrumental reason, as well as visual and empirical truth.
Gerber's three 79 x 79 cm silverprints hang in a tidy horizontal row on a false wall which he had fabricated in order to truncate the gallery artificially. Hanging flush with the top of this unusually low dividing wall, the three photographs re-articulate the three gallery windows it blocks out. The space behind the false wall is out of bounds. Only the fluorescent tubes of light that flood the 'official' exhibition area are allowed to penetrate this section of empty space. Leaving the remainder of the viewable gallery untouched. Gerber creates an environment that denies spatial verity, de-stabilising observation and confusing issues of ownership.
The photographs, each encased in a Perspex frame, similarly examine mediated and manipulated forms of information. Acknowledging a non-veridical visual language, Gerber's pictures operate in the domain of the abstract. Untitled (Clear Sky) (1995) is a field of suspended air: Clear Sky/Garden Addition (1996) and Clear Sky/Flower (1996) float in a scrim of powdered charcoal that has been screen-printed over the photographic image. This process results in mercurial images, one depicting prosaic flower blossoms and the other, a garden shed of distressed charm. Shifty and tenuous, like Etch-a-Sketch doodles, these pictures, with their tiny particles of charcoal, echo the molecular structures of house plants and clouds, artists and viruses, mountains and suns.
In the heavily technologised and electronically mediated world, three-dimensional imagery can no longer guarantee reality. As a result of this shift, Gerber presents the viewer with physical conditions that make it difficult merely to observe his work. He designs visual environments with complex and open phenomena. His photographs look under-developed, incomplete. His temporary wall, partitioning off an unseemly amount of perfectly good gallery space de-centres one's experience of art display. Enticing us with beauty and restraint, physical space and simulations, Gerber dissects the parts and processes of visual perception.
Untitled (Clear Sky) and the walled-off gallery space appear empty, void of information, yet both have a trajectory. They articulate the history of Minimalism and its critical reconstruction, the displacement of art practice as well as its renewal. Gerber's installation of three photographs offers us a theory of context and gives us a background on which to work. The space he constructs is slippery and beautiful, irritating and contradictory.
From a satellite three hundred miles above the earth, the grassy relief tracing the circuitous path of the super accelerator in the Northern Illinois landscape looks like a perfect circle. Its creator, Robert Wilson, was disappointed that you could not see the accelerator ring above ground so he accented its presence with a six metre-high berm. With Perspex box frames, smudges of graphite and oddly proportioned walls, Gerber also makes concrete the consequential act of seeing the invisible.
