Pollack’s error makes art
Carrie Pollack is a poet of impermanence. Her subject is memory and the visual echoes that surround us everywhere. On daily walks with her camera, she records deteriorating poster debris, the sky at a particular moment—the usual stuff to which we ordinarily pay little attention—then subjects the imagery to computer processing and prints the final result on unsized artist’s linen. Her experiments engage old-school photo collage, familiar from the days of dada, early pop and new realism in France. Surprisingly, new-school charm wins in these thoughtful covers of oldie classics.
Carrie Pollack, “Blanket 1,” 2011, Pigment ink on linen, 36 x 26 in. Courtesy MINUS SPACE.
The notion that we know it already fades as what should be static imagery comes to life through the artist’s careful attention to the process of presentation, a process not without elements of comic unpredictability. Time and again the fabric jams in her printer, requiring readjustment. The artist’s attempts to precisely reposition the material and resume printing inevitably produces over-printed stripes of varying width across the image, technology’s equivalent of the expressionist’s drip. In her exploitation of these and other quirky “errors,” Pollack has discovered the garden in the machine.
Exhibiting the works involves further subversion. Rather than delivering a prepared show, the artist arrives at the gallery with a roll of images and wooden stretchers of various sizes. The work is then stretched according to an intuitive process, often with the images off-center or out of alignment.
Pollack’s humor, elements of performance/intervention and interest in technology link her aesthetic to artists such as Karin Sander. A modest-sized piece, “New Sky 1” (2011), is simply a barely inflected photo of a blank sky printed on linen. It hangs off by itself, but don’t miss it.
With Witness, her first solo exhibition, Pollack has taken on imagery weighted with the avant-garde past. Dada’s torn paper drawings will shortly be a century old, and Arp’s hastily scribbled poetry was delivered to his printer with the instruction that the printer supply any words he might find illegible. Their attack of established culture and society proposed thorough disorder. Pollack’s process and allusive poetry are a gentler, reductive rebellion, announcing neither anti-art nor avant-garde but rather a refined awareness of image and support adapting to current concerns.
Carrie Pollack: Witness
Through Feb. 25, MINUS SPACE, 111 Front St., Ste. 226, Brooklyn,
347-525-4628, www.minusspace.com.
