It’s a tricky task to critique commerce through the making and selling of objects. While some artists’ work can appear disingenuous in the effort, Walead Beshty pulls it off with wit and a sheer exuberance for the process of making. Were he less skilled at producing images and objects than at intellectual prodding, it would be tempting to read his work simply as an homage to Conceptualism; instead, the multiple forces at play bring a palpable energy to his large photograms and mixed-media sculptures, a broad selection of which constitutes this two-gallery exhibition. Rich with swirling colors and reminiscent of the chemical baths that produced them, the pictures are the result of folding photographic paper so that it becomes a surface of angles and planes, corners and creases, and, when processed, a photo of nothing but itself. Of the sculptures, the most successful, shown at Redling Fine Art, integrate paper pulp made from Beshty works that, according to the gallery, were either unsold or headed for the recycling bin. These were cut up and mixed into a paste to make sculptural forms, some of which will be added to over the course of the exhibition; to that end, blenders are set up in the space, operated by an assistant who toils like an art-world Rumpelstiltskin. The fluidity and immediacy of the process is exciting, yet were it Beshty himself spinning the old into potential gold, the simultaneity of this critique of and passion for objects, and the politics of commerce that regulates them, would have been even more persuasive.
This exhibition is also on view at China Art Objects until February 2.
