“Beautiful Potential”

Comprising three installations, two videos, and two wall pieces, the exhibition “Beautiful Potential” celebrates the promise inherent in the unfinished—the moment before our perception of the outside environment becomes fixed. Shane McCarthy’s Beautiful Expectation, and Coy Signal, both 2011, consist of projected texts that appear to hover just in front of the wall. In the former work, a stepladder, electric sander, hanging cables, and wall sockets are arranged near the projection, physical materials that help create the text’s illusion of immateriality.

Anna Sagström’s pair of short black-and-white films, collectively titled When I Entered, Silent Aviation, 2011, were shot from a hot air balloon as it drifted over the countryside and a cityscape. Moving in and out of a hazy blur as the camera’s focus finds and loses clarity, each film reveals the present to be perpetually in flux. In Sagström’s installation Alone like an Animal, and Yet Think, 2011, painted animal hides are loosely draped over wooden poles as a guitar rendition of Neil Young’s 1974 album On the Beach haunts the space, calling on the absent lyrics: “All my pictures are falling from the wall where I placed them yesterday.” This work, an unspecified point in an unknowable story, valorizes the latent promise of the indefinite to succumb to whatever our needs may be. Finally, in Untitled, 2006, Uri Aran has applied pieces of sheet metal, wood stain, glue, and paint to a pair of cereal boxes, an act that dismantles the boxes’ original function, launching each into a more fluid stage of existence.