Roman Signer assembles machines: water-spilling machines, trouser-blowing machines, bottle-swinging machines. Each has a limited set of materials, is simply constructed, and has a narrow range of seemingly likely consequences. But his systems quickly shed their utilitarian shrouds, revealing in their activation an open-ended interrogation. In the gallery’s main space, Chairs, 2007, is an absurd, introspective variation on the competitions featured on the television show Robot Wars. A small, cherry-red automated lawn mower whirs around the gallery floor among fifteen chairs; anytime it exceeds a boundary marked in red tape or meets resistance from any furniture or gallery visitors in its path, it stops, turns left, and continues. The chairs rest in a seemingly random pattern, some pushed to the room’s perimeter by the robot’s insistent bumps.
Downstairs, a half-empty bottle of Scotch, suspended by a string over a large electric fan, swings in lopsided circles. It is wryly meditative and hints at an alcoholic vertigo, but at the same time, there is a simple delight in its endless dance. On a video projected in the next room, Signer fires a revolver but repeatedly misses his tin-can target, as his hand is shaking uncontrollably from the vibrating weight-loss belt he’s strapped into. Signer’s playfully surreal misuse of objects sets them afloat in sea of new possible functions. Like the gleeful child of a clockmaker and a mad scientist, Signer conducts experiments that have a calculated start but an undetermined end point, giving them an elemental, organic quality—as if the unexpected will occur at any moment. Each work is a machine for creating questions, starting with the excited, expectant, What can happen?
