Installation view of Seven’s ‘Anonymity, no longer an option’ at the Boiler (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
A red light blinking from a gilded security camera greets visitors to Seven’s surveillance-themed Anonymity, no longer an option. The seventh edition of the collaborative Seven exhibition has seven galleries representing seven artists at Pierogi’s The Boiler in Williamsburg, with a very special guest: the anonymously-made Edward Snowden bust that infiltrated Fort Greene Park last month and was recently released by the NYPD.
Anonymous, “Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument 2.0, AKA ‘The Snowden Statue’” (2015), galvanized steel, hydrocal FGR 95, latex, enamel, oil paint, powdered gold
Seven is one of the smaller gallery offerings this Frieze Week, and the advantage of that scale is a tighter focus that can have some meaning beyond overdosing on art. Those gold-leafed closed circuit television cameras by Addie Wagenknecht, presented by Bitforms Gallery, may be disabled, but they provide a symbolic entrance into an exhibition that reminds you at each turn that you’re being watched. Trevor Paglen with Metro Pictures has a couple of large-scale photographs of government defense measures including the Gorgon Stare surveillance blimp involving multiple covert cameras, and Postmasters Gallery (which also helped bring the Snowden bust) has Katarzyna Kozyra’s 1997 hidden camera shots of women inside a Budapest public bathhouse. Each piece has some scavenged information, although Anonymity might be more powerful if it explained more how data was pulled from our world and used in these pieces, emphasizing the impact on our individual lives (which is exactly what the information leaked by Snowden did). The late Mark Lombardi hosted by Pierogi Gallery has a chart connecting the World Finance Corporation and associates all gleaned from the news and publications, and Mark Tribe with Momenta Art has an aerial landscape based on available geospatial data of a wetland in Colusa county, California.
Even without Snowden’s bust towering in the center of the room, looking a bit less regal off his renegade perch at the Fort Greene Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument and on a white column instead, there is plenty of strong work on the vulnerability of our information. From Sam Van Aken’s “Myshkin’s Idiot Light” presented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts pulsing with lights at the rate of brain synapsis, to Wagenknecht’s “Kilohydra 2” flashing LEDs from a tangle of chords on the wall that are responding to logged anonymous data from local Wifi, it feels claustrophobic even in the Boiler’s roomy industrial space.
Addie Wagenknecht, “-r-xr-xr-x” (2014), two surveillance cameras, gold leaf (Bitforms Gallery)
Trevor Paglen, “Contrails (R-4808N Restricted Airspace, NV)” (2012), C-print (Metro Pictures)
Addie Wagenknecht, “Kilohydra 2” (2014), custom designed PCB boards, ethernet patch cables, 80/20 aluminum (Bitforms Gallery)
Katarzyna Kozyra, “Women’s Bathhouse” (1997/2015), color photographs (Postmasters Gallery)
Sam Van Aken, “Myshkin’s Idiot Light” (2015), mixed media (Ronald Feldman Fine Arts)
Mark Tribe, “Colusa” (2014), UV print on Dibond (Momenta Art)
Mark Tribe, “Birdsall II” and “V” (2012), digital video (Momenta Art)
Suzanne Treister, “Post Surveillance Art” (2014), 20 archival giclée prints on Hahnemuhle Bamboo paper (PPOW)
Anonymous, “Prison Ship Martyr’s Monument 2.0, AKA ‘The Snowden Statue’” (2015), galvanized steel, hydrocal FGR 95, latex, enamel, oil paint, powdered gold
Anonymity, no longer an option continues as part of Seven at The Boiler (191 North 14th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn) through May 17.
