An anti-aesthetic notion is taken in a direction not towards its core yet precisely to any potential concrete spatial findings, and super imposing upon a digital platform is a curated mirror of nothing but space. An online exhibition that leaves here, contemplating any possible direction inside delusive planes. How should we see in this striking report on the current state of affairs? Artist Mike Zahn is the curator of an artwork, exhibition, non-exhibition, and documentation titled Todo y Nada, or Everything and Nothing at Shrine NYC. The script originates from an autocorrect text message that was made into a meme and has circulated online. It asks: “What’s wrong?” The answer: “Nothing (Everything).”
Zahn’s body of work piercingly plays with conceptual turns that evidently construct large and small spatial gravitations. I’m calling them gravitations, because the artworks pull you in as concepts themselves. Maybe they are an iteration of creations like Richard Tuttle’s casual yet moving plywood works. Zahn’s welcome humor balances some of the existentialism, though. By employing found objects, repurposed images, sculpting, and collage techniques, he develops worlds. Some of them are frame-worked homes with damaged hard drives inside. Others are meditations on a daily morning routine, copying real life onto a canvas. It’s important to emphasize the visual element as speaking to ruminations on perception. They collide life with art and vice versa as we find ourselves interpolating the frameworks through our own presence inside these pieces. You have to be there, they say. We may only distinguish them through knowledge of deconstructing reality ourselves, and this exhibition is the tam in his work which says just that.
Todo y Nada furthers the convincing move of art spaces into the digital realm. A duplication of the empty gallery is created with a photograph of itself and placed on the wall. For the exhibition, there were five large-scale printed images that were shot from different positions within the space. Each of these contains a wall, the floor, and a different direction or a framed window pane. Once hung on the wall, a photograph was snapped of this artwork. And now, being an online show, we view these works through another rectangular viewfinder also known as the screen on your desktop computer. The images appear as if reflections inside a camera, bouncing off the inverted mirror and projected out of the screen to us. The show seems to be the perfect ontologically perplexing portrayal of an online exhibition. Our imagination is left to be the lens when we search for meaning, but the images just stare back at us. We must visualize being there for ourselves.
When the world is spiraling out of control, we respond with ease and with reassurance that everything is ok. The contradiction is implicit. Absurdity is another form of literary technique which Zahn employs in this work. Placed at the end of the exhibition, the text message image breaks the silence of our previously suspended thoughts. In which reality are we? Zahn answers Lepecki’s call to rescue the witness by realizing yet a perfected separation from shared experience. This reality will cipher in captivated internalized multi-dimensions, because repetition revolves the returned to us image through appropriation. Around every corner, the gallery’s likeness.