Chinatown, New York
Ken Jacobs
Other Urban Lives
Miguel AbreuMiguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present Ken Jacobs’s Other Urban Lives. This exhibition marks the final part of The Whole Shebang, a retrospective program organized by Andrew Lampert across fourteen museums and cinemas in the city. The majority of Ken Jacobs's captivating late digital works revolve around images photographed with a small 3D camera in his longtime lower Manhattan neighborhood. Reworking these photos with his assistants (in this case, artist Antoine Catala as editor) into what he called “eternalisms"—strobing loop-like images that, among other things, oscillate between positive and negative—the artist transformed all too familiar and easily overlooked street scenes into cosmically-charged, intensely throbbing moments of pure euphoria. In Other Urban Lives (2023), a tree stump becomes an undulating world unto itself and the limits of space are stretched beyond easy recognition. The result is a spectacular form of 3D that can be seen without the aid of glasses.