Exhibition
Enlightened Objects: Sculptures by Saul Chernick + Collaborative installation with InnerKiddo
9 May 2021 – 20 Jun 2021
Regular hours
- Sunday
- 12:00 – 15:00
- Saturday
- 12:00 – 15:00
Address
- 348 South 4th Street
- New York
New York - 11211
- United States
There’s no getting around how good Saul Chernick’s Enlightened Objects look. They are a surprise party. They’re just what we always wanted.
About
And in this startled confusion of joy, things are rearranged. The astonishment of the unexpected is somehow superseded by the feeling of an anticipated pleasure. These objects simultaneously generate and satisfy a desire as particular as a fixation, and this tripped sequence becomes an event. It sparks and reiterates, like a fireworks display.The work is both naïve and perverse, at once, unrefined and ornate. But the apparent decoration is, in fact, structural. Out of this fusion of the accidental and the essential, of a language and the meanings it elaborates, new figures sprout: generative compulsions, fertile preoccupations. Like porn or a joke, this formalism in pursuit of pleasure disentangles from the anxiety of interpretation and becomes a magical device, a spell, effecting response by means of composition. It exits the discourse for other engagements.
The found elements are a discursive break, a direct address. They’re talking straight to the camera. They are so recognizable as to become our own. But their incorporation betrays an unreasonable equanimity of valuation, an alien assessment. There is no object more familiar than this particular telephone. It is our family phone, from the table in the hall. And here we encounter it, as if reproduced in a museum on another planet, its intricate inaccuracies betraying that it was reconstructed in absolute ignorance, not as a cultural artifact, but as an instance of formal perfection. This is not recontextualization, it is a collapsed binary, and again, this coupling of two poles, makes for a super charged object, like a battery.
It is out of extravagant elaborations, meticulous fantasies, and a lack of all proportion, that Saul Chernick has generated these Enlightened Objects. They can be used as domestic power sources, as kitchen table idols, as psychic projectors. They are to decorate our dream house, and by decorate, he means make possible.
They are for us.
