2 Art Gallery Shows to Explore From Home
Galleries and museums are getting creative about presenting work online during the coronavirus crisis. Here are two shows worth viewing virtually.
Sterling Crispin’s Collective Deceleration to Nature, left, and Escape Vehicle 001, both from 2020.
Sterling Crispin: ‘Future Tense’
Through May 11. Online at False Flag, false-flag.org.
In times of uncertainty, it’s hard to think about the future. That’s part of what makes Sterling Crispin’s first solo exhibition so compelling. I’d seen photographs of the show but didn’t make it to the gallery before it closed because of the coronavirus crisis. Now I find myself returning to those images.
“Future Tense” consists of complex objects that would undoubtedly reward in-person viewing. Mr. Crispin often uses sophisticated technologies like 3-D printing, virtual reality and machine-learning algorithms to create his work. Yet technology is also one of his primary subjects — how it interfaces with and diverges from the natural world. And how we have become an advanced society on a path to rendering itself extinct.
The profound strangeness of this discrepancy pervades the exhibition, which is filled with ordinary items gone haywire (and is well-documented on False Flag’s website and Mr. Crispin’s Instagram account): fire extinguishers that are also candelabras, watches that don’t tell time (one reads “Don’t panic”), flower arrangements springing from vessels that look like machine parts, and oversize inspection tags containing hopeful and apocalyptic texts like “The time has come.”
The front of the surfboard-shaped “Escape Vehicle 001” (2020) features a graph of the global temperature overlaid with stock price trading diagrams. It’s shooting toward either the collapse of our ecosystem or A.I. saving the planet. Despite the promise of the work’s title, its form suggests another lesson: We can’t escape the future so much as find a way to ride on through it.
JILLIAN STEINHAUER