Gabriel Sierra

Gabriel Sierra’s “Assembly Instructions” requests that visitors enter “as slowly as possible while smiling softly” and then stop smiling once they step beyond a delimited area. The fourteen stations spread throughout the gallery space, ranging from subtle markings to quasi-architectural constructions, each feature similarly witty or melancholic directives describing its function. Some such as “Area for People Wearing Old Shoes” give purpose to spaces or objects rather than scripting behavior. All the stations are white, matching the walls of the institution’s polygonal space; the simple rectangular constructions suggest Corbusian modernism imbued with Fluxus absurdity.

Sierra’s attention to the space’s details extends to a similar concern with time; the title of the exhibition changes every hour (11:00 am is “How the Outside Leaks into the Room,” 3:00 pm “An Actual Location for This Moment”). He alludes to his Colombian identity obliquely, designating an area for “Five Americans” or “Five non-Americans” depending on the time of day, a distant echo of Alfredo Jaar’s A Logo for America, 1987, a Times Square LED display that identified the entire hemisphere, rather than just the North, as America. To the left of this sits a split structure for two types of naps. The bed of hay in the “fifteenth century” half of this space recalls Hélio Oiticica’s Eden, 1969, while the pile of newspapers in the “twentieth century” half invokes the media art experiments of 1960s and ’70s Latin American artists such as David Lamelas and Antonio Manuel. If Sierra’s ludic situations and quasi-architectures risk superficiality, his historical resonances interrupt any strictly subjectivized participation.