“We would provide complete darkness”

The title of this group show is a provocative, if not quite fulfilled, threat. Nowhere in the gallery is darkness complete, but the imagery in the video art in the narrow entryway challenges the limits of obscurity. Heike Baranowsky’s Mondfahrt 2001, a filmed loop of the moon bouncing around on a blank wall like a projected beach ball screen saver, beams over a monitor, and headphones play Carsten Nicolai’s abstract tone-poem video future past perfect pt. 01 (sononda), 2010. The dark passage to the gallery’s back room stages the dazzling patterns of Kitty Kraus’s untitled 2011 site-specific installation in which two asymmetrical boxes composed of mirrors enclose hundred-watt lightbulbs. Through their irregular joints, sheets of complex refracted light escape, striking the walls of the room erratically but also with mathematical perfection. That shadowy displacement of the mirrors’ infinite regression is entrancing even as it is confounding.

Emerging into the foyer, one encounters a small library of “underused books” free for the taking; booklets with butterflied spines, printed for the exhibition, have been inconspicuously inserted into several of the volumes. A collaboration between Sarah Demeuse, the show’s curator, and the design firm Project Projects, the book offers ruminations on the complexities of written communication, from Alejandro Cesarco on the fantastic encyclopedias in Jorge Luis Borges’s literature to Angie Keefer’s dialectical examination of the disembodiment and reification of signs. The central paradox of language is most tellingly essayed by Adam Kleinman, through an analysis of the gold discs designed in the early 1970s to communicate with extraterrestrials, with grooves encoding greetings, songs, and pictures from Earth. The problem with making LPs for ETs is the same with comprehending any language system from the outside: Not only do you have to decode the message, but you then have to know what it means. (Kleinman suggests that a response from aliens clever enough to actually play the records might be, “We enjoyed your library, but don’t quite get it all, and wonder what on Earth you are trying to tell us.”) One might have a similar thought standing in front of the unordered library—moon bouncing around in the shadows—and pivoting between darkness and understanding.