BARAK ZEMER
Chair
January 17 - May 30, 2022
Monumental at thirteen feet but banal, pedestrian but utterly surreal, gaudy but low-rent, aggressively cheerful but sinister, over-the-top but coy and back-sided, clinical but claustrophobic, out-of-this-world unlocatable but hyperbolically local. The light is flash-bright and uncanny, the distance between interior and blue-sky landscape weirdly flattened. While tempted to go on, I should not because doing so only narrows and directs your read of this strange image, both familiar and not, when really the point here is the fluorescent buzz of colliding associations triggered by something simultaneously so highly specific and deliberately capacious in its basic subject matter: a chair. For an artist like Zemer whose photographic practice is about a personal documentary sensibility imaged in sequences and series, the singularity of this one enormous picture filling the entirety of its wall and overwhelming the gallery’s small space even as it paradoxically enlarges it, is a true experiment in a kind of openness, insinuation, and free-fall untethering of context. Take a seat.
