Sensory Second-Guessing

This month, TILT Export—the roving curatorial project
Josh Smith and Jenene Nagy launched after closing Tilt Gallery and
Project Space—has transformed galleryHOMELAND into a funhouse of
sensory second-guessing. If the gallery’s ad hoc space within the Ford
Building has posed challenges for exhibiting conventional work, those
artists who have worked with the building’s idiosyncrasies have fared
much better. With Approximate, a truly site-specific
collaboration between sound artist Ethan Rose and the currently
ubiquitous Damien Gilley, the artists have taken the space’s usual
distractions—railings, doors, encroaching pipes, and foot traffic
to the building’s businesses—and twisted them into fascinating
focal points.

Rose’s sound installation, “Passage,” is full of rich, bellowing
hammer dulcimer tones, submerged in a wash of musique concrète
native to the building: echoing footsteps, the mumbled cadences of
distant voices, doors closing, and rumbling trains. Composed of loops
of varying lengths and broadcast through eight channels dispersed
through the building, “Passage” creates the paranoid illusion that
unseen activity is unfolding around every corner. At times, it’s
difficult to parse Rose’s recordings from the building’s own ambient
sounds, creating a pleasantly disorienting hall-of-mirrors effect.

Gilley’s installation, “Absorption Field,” on the other hand,
complicates one’s sense of spatial relationships with a body of
meticulously executed masking tape “drawings.” These drawings conjure
the clean lines of architectural blueprints as well as the 3D
landscapes of vintage Atari arcade games, like Battlezone and
Star Wars. But, Gilley’s structures—barricades,
watchtowers, and depots—draw viewers in with their trompe
l’œil perspectives, only to reassert their depthless foundations.
These works are most effective when Gilley incorporates elements from
the space directly into the drawings. For example, a railed
catwalk—likely to a utility closet—is repurposed as a
pathway to an imagined marine lookout, as Gilley tapes out a second
railing on the wall as a foreground to the structure itself. In all,
“Absorption Field” shows Gilley’s ability to fully explore a single
idea—and the show’s all the stronger for it. Matched with Rose’s
installation, Approximate disrupts the senses with far more
precision than that name implies.