Bullet Space, New York

“The society which, by fixing itself in place locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this local- ization. The temporal return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a series of gestures.”— Guy Debord from The Society of the Spectacle,1967
Perhaps what the avatar of Situationism is getting at here with this quote is that the reality of a place is determined by the gestures that repeatedly occur in that place. In Wrong Place for the Right People, a solid yet simultaneously ephemeral group show, the accumulated gestures of twelve individuals lyri- cally prove that point. The curators seem carefully aware of how presence can be achieved by mark- ing, casting, word play, photography and inscribed symbols and documentation. The work is installed in a discursive ramble through a series of present moments, alternating between the barely there to the gravitationally inevitable. There is a unity of tone in the muted grays, under-saturated color and stark black and white works, but this unity is belied by the wildly ranging conversation going on between the works in the show. What makes this wrong place an interesting place to be in is the diversity and rich- ness of the repeated gestures happening here. Its “there-ness” is a mutable yet palpable reality that remains light on its feet. A traveler or refugee would relate to this conditional definition of place.

The abstract photographer Tenesh Webber, on the other hand, takes a more disembodied approach to phenomenal presence. In Clouds II she projects a slide of an atomized field that hovers indeterminately between matter and nothin ness, its substance thrown into an ambiguous transcendent light.