Abstract
…the plan should not have to do with an exploit or record, it would be neither a peak to scale nor an ocean floor to reach ... [it] would not be heroic, or spectacular; it would be something simple and discreet, difficult of course but not impossibly so, controlled from start to finish and conversely controlling every detail of the life of the man engaged upon it…
In his 1978 work “Life, A User’s Manual” George Perec creates a novel from a series of detached observations of a Parisian apartment block. As the novel unfolds, these observations that at first glance appear as infinite lists of disconnected information, create a jigsaw of rooms with their inhabitants caught in a moment of time. The descriptions of apartments with their eccentric tenants, lists of contents, and structural relationships are puzzled into a perceptibly beautiful complexity. Viewing becomes an activity where written structures are collected together to create a site of convergence.
Using Perec’s novel as a model, 106 Green (known as an exhibition space as well as working artists studios) temporarily houses work by Jonathan Ehrenberg, Rochelle Feinstein, Dana Frankfort, Jackie Gendel, Christopher K. Ho, Jennifer Hodges, Mikhail Iliatov, Julian Kreimer, Susan Lichtman, Justin Lieberman, Bobbie Oliver, Rachel Roske, Zak Smith, Craig Taylor, and Kevin Zucker. The objects put together in this space have connections either in genre, aesthetic modes, narrative impulses, or in the fact of being devised by artists who work in close conceptual proximity. The show becomes an enigmatic puzzle that invites interpretations and creates relationships between the artists, the space, and the viewer.