This show by Josiah McElheny conveyed the force of his preoccupation with history as a creative medium—with the way in which it is made and, at points, seems to make itself when social, aesthetic, and practical agendas converge. No moment epitomizes his vision more perfectly than the turn of the twentieth century, with its mentality of abstraction. Organized as an address to “painting,” this show featured thirteen objects presented as abstract paintings, though fashioned from materials rarely associated with the medium. Included among these works were two black-and-white videos manufactured from outtakes of lost films by Maya Deren, and two small photograms ostensibly based on forms by Kandinsky and Malevich but equally resembling the diatom, the single-celled organism encased in silica studied in the early twentieth century by German biologist Ernst Haeckel and by the esoteric painter Hilma af Klint, one of the first abstract artists on record.

McElheny also included several of his wall-hung cabinets of visual curiosity, constructed of colored glass and wood and stocked with simple glass forms. These handmade cases are time machines activated by the viewer’s attention. Referencing an early design by Ellsworth Kelly, Window Painting I, 2015, presents a glazed portal onto an imagined world: In the arrangement of glass forms, we can glimpse the foggy revenants of what, in the past, might have been bottles on a windowsill or tall buildings in the distance. Yet when we peer into the tinted glass, we cannot perfectly fix our gaze; we see both forward through a kind of screen into the past and backward at our own reflection now—at the fleeting facts of our own time and place.

Beneath it all is McElheny’s interest in conjuring an instant that fuses the observer’s retinal experience before the glass with a projected turn back in time. For him (as for Walter Benjamin), the prism embodies such a moment, as it splits white light—aka “truth”—into its individual wavelengths. In McElheny’s so-called prism paintings, faceted-glass medallions glimmer from beds of black wood to pull the viewer into an encounter with history’s impossible conceit. Time as McElheny conceives it is an interactive moment of viewers, makers, and their devices, now and then. History can be slow or fast, complex or simple, repetitive or momentous. But it is never not here, and it was the animating force of the show.

In this prismatic, colorful conception, it follows that McElheny has chosen to term his new work “painting,” evoking a discourse in which object, subject, medium, and materiality have inspired multiple, antagonized points of view. In the vivid moment of early abstraction, as McElheny sees it, painting emerged from a dynamo of ideas, scientific research, and spiritual practices that each responded to the new velocity of modern life and compression of time that seemed to be shattering the past—and just possibly to be collapsing the present and any autonomic sensation of futurity. In tandem with mathematical efforts to better formulate time, there were mystical societies, such as the theosophists, who interpreted the fourth dimension as a mode of being beyond common comprehension, something only to be apprehended through mystical transcendence, which offered simultaneous, and infinite, perspectives of present, future, and past. The multifaceted prism was among theosophy’s symbols, and, although they were unknown to one another, Kandinsky and af Klint both deployed the crystalline pyramid to produce radiant colors and shapes in their painting and to theorize time’s behavior.

What this view of history allows is a space where one can appreciate af Klint next to Kelly next to Deren, and even next to the post-painterly Albert Oehlen. But still, there was something about this show: Despite the nod to Oehlen, McElheny’s interest stops at the brink of modernism, leaving the visitor to wonder eagerly what his practice will bring going forward. It is tempting to compare the artist, at least within the context of this show, to Benjamin’s angel of history, an ambivalent figure who, though yearning to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” is propelled ineluctably into the future by a storm, which, according to the German writer, “is what we call progress.”

—Susan Bielstein