- Lekha Jandhyala
Artists: Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, Ghislaine Leung
CONCRETE derives its form from the structural conditions that often compose standard exhibitions: walls, light, and space. Three artists, Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, and Ghislaine Leung, take the exhibition as a site to expose the unseen and indeterminate systems that, too, shape a viewing experience. Carefully balanced between order and ambiguity, their works complicate distinctions between the existing and the presumed. Together, the works suggest mutable contingencies—some gestures remain legible, while others resist clear and immediate interpretation.
Protruding walls, extended metal tubing, and a single text-based painting are the only objects populating the exhibition. Intentionally restrained, CONCRETE disrupts expectations of an open, neutral space. A side-step is required to navigate walls that cut into the room. Across the gallery, electrical conduit extends from the plenum of the Hessel Museum. Within a painting, words are isolated on a single wall. The works emphasize the usually hidden infrastructures that construct and sustain an artwork.
Instead of a straightforward encounter with art, the exhibition draws attention to its institutional framework and the viewer’s relationship to both. Visible material is to be reconsidered, inviting cognitive construction so that the unapparent appears. Departing from the expectation of an exhibition as a finite presentation, CONCRETE proposes a way to see anew.
