Steven Pippin

Located in 620A Upstairs, the apartment-turned-gallery above Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Steven Pippin’s exhibition looks like the modern-day creation of a Victorian scientist with an irrepressible poetic urge. Pippin, who studied mechanical engineering before moving on to art school, presents the culmination of a project spanning roughly twelve years. The centerpiece of this finale is an eccentric-looking machine (Geoflatscreen Prototype, 2004) that simulates (on a two-dimensional screen) the Earth’s rotation. One must turn and contort in tandem with the device in order to view the little planet on its route, making its perennial voyage look strange and awkward. Another intriguing image is of a pencil, standing upright on its point, a neat metaphor for the state of the open universe, perfectly balanced between its potential inward collapse and its uncontrollable expansion. In a video that can be viewed through the bedroom window (Omega=1, 2005), a device developed to duplicate this Omega Point is in perpetual motion as it flawlessly balances a real pencil. The sequence is shot in a cool, levelheaded style reminiscent of scientific and educational films from the ’60s and ’70s, suspending the “experiment” in a gray area between art, science, and philosophy. “The hardness or grade of the pencil,” Pippin states in an accompanying text, “is 2B for obvious existential and philosophical reasons.”