Skylight Dimension is a presentation of a new sculpture. The title refers to an ink marking on a sheet metal sculpture inside 55 Gansevoort's storefront gallery. Sheet metal is used to create roof flashing. This particular flashing was found on the corner of Wyckoff and Troutman in Bushwick. Originally covering an auto body repair shop, the removed flashing has made way for a skylight to be installed in a soon-to-open German Biergarten. Chopped uniformly to ninety-seven inches wide, then screwed directly to the wall in a vertical stack, its installation evokes cascading bookshelves, but is formally deceptive. It denies its initial promise. It makes claims to a labor it cannot provide / a function it can't perform.
Mounted precariously, Skylight Dimension couldn't support a Kindle's slight weight, the flimsy structure suggests the fragility of the industrial economy built around the American dream. The work insists that fixation neither negates nor implies strength, and alludes to the perceived conception of 20th-century minimal American sculpture as hyper-masculine strength. The flashing, thrown away, discarded, rendered useless, has claimed renewed utility as a work of art. Post-industrial debris is repurposed in the luxury context of a gallery space, rendering it sacred. And yet its display in the window, taken alongside the formal architecture of the neighborhood, renders it, in turn, a commodity. Look but don't touch: aside from the opening, access to the sculpture is limited to viewing from the sidewalk through rippled glass, thus evading closer inspection. Lit twenty-four hours a day with florescent tubes, the sculpture is continually buzzing in the space. Here its circuitous tour pauses, offering the passerby nothing more than an encapsulated abstraction.
Aaron Bobrow (b. 1985) received his BFA from Parsons School of Design. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Office Baroque, Brussels. He has also been featured in group shows at Martos Gallery, New York; Clearing Gallery, New York and Jonathan Viner, London. Upcoming shows include FARAGO, Los Angeles and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton.
The exhibitions at 55 Gansevoort are entirely visible, at all hours, by peering through the windowed doors.
