Wax Gourd

Wax Gourd, Oto Gillen’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2016, consists of eight photographs taken throughout New York over the past five years. Perhaps the record of a walk through the street over one very long day, or a collection of moments torn from an archive of anonymous memories, Gillen’s images slip in and out of their timelines. Projecting both forwards and backwards, they present an account of the city in all of its triumph and trauma. It is a history contrasted with its often pitiful particulars—a pile of roast peanuts constructed into an ersatz edifice, a bin full of fish gasping for air on a street corner, a melon for sale on Mott Street that appears like an anachronistic vanitas. These objects all speak to frustrated yearnings, or small acts of bittersweet defiance, up against an insistent and inevitable skyline. All of the works are presented in a mode of Gillen’s own devising: dye sublimation prints in aluminum folded to be supported without a frame. The images are presented without ornament or distraction: in this way they are conversant with projection, a medium of import to Gillen. Rather than a collection of imaginary mementos, Gillen’s images have an ambiguity that leads to their constant reinterpretation. A mass of bodies, under a crimson sky, gathered on the onramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, appears variably as an image of foreboding, or of celebration.