Seeing Kyle Seis’ exhibition at The Alice Wilds gallery through the window outside, it’s possible to imagine you are looking at a suite of Cubist oil paintings from 1912. Variegated and faceted compositions build from a dusty palette of taupes, beiges and grays that will remind some of the work of Juan Gris, Georges Braques and Pablo Picasso. Once inside the gallery, though, it becomes clear that they aren’t paintings, but digitally manipulated photographs of stones, that happen to have a very painterly sensibility. The show’s title “The Surface of a Stone is Always in Motion,” confirms the exhibition’s subject matter and alludes to Seis’ deep interest in optics and visual psychology.
A baker’s dozen of archival pigment prints fill out the show. They range from 20 by 16 inches to 30 by 24 inches and are all very much of a family. Each composition emerges from a disorienting combination of collage, digital rendering and straight photography. Superficially they are almost repetitively similar, though by narrowing the parameters of visual expectation, they cajole the viewer into more intense inspection of each one’s internal complexities.
A 20-by-16-inch work on the inside of the East wall––untitled, as they all are––intersperses highly detailed and obscured sections of photographed stones that have been parsed and recomposed in “post” on the computer. The surface play of this and several other works mimics the effect of reflective glare on glass, making them irritatingly difficult to pin down. That’s intentional of course—retinal frustration here is intentional. Many of the works interfere with the viewer’s natural urge to establish figure/ground and depth-of-field relationships, remaining stubbornly flat and solid as one might wish them to expand and disperse into landscapes.
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Seis’ compositional conceit in the show is surprisingly basic, but from those few economical decisions a seemingly endless array of visual, conceptual and intellectual inferences emerges.
In their skillful embellishment and deft control of visual experience, his photographs say a lot about the future of digital imagery, inside and outside of the art world. They metaphorically predict what’s sure to be the rockiest of matrimonial futures between the computer and the camera. How does looking at a photograph compare to a direct visual encounter with an object? What “truth” is there in enhanced or manipulated images in a world where enhancement is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception? When photographic objectivity erodes irretrievably, as it soon will, will separate, subjective and artistically proximate truths rise in its place?
His work may happen to have countless topical implications, but the soul of Seis’ practice seems to reside in the study of perception itself. His photographs, prior to and in this exhibition, engage in the long history of phenomenological investigation begun by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and continued by everyone from Josef Albers to Bob Morris to Anish Kapoor. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty suggested that all post-Cartesian thought erroneously took for granted the “cogito” in “cogito ergo sum” by assuming that the condition of our perceptions and sensory information was in fact homogenous. He questioned the very solidity, unity and continuity of what we consider a primary sensorial experience, and advocated for a new kind of art making as a result. But really, that’s just a pedantic encapsulation of some very esoteric philosophy: simply another way to say, “The surface of a stone is always in motion.”
While some thinkers spill gallons of ink telling us, Seis elegantly shows us how our visual impressions of something, say, a stone, are always fluid, binocular, four-dimensional, unstable and impermanent. Seis admirably manages to capture the visual essence of one of the thornier philosophical propositions of that past century in visual terms more elegantly than many who’ve written about it. To render text inferior, and perhaps unnecessary, with visual communication is a notable achievement and probably the most significant takeaway, of the many takeaways, from this gem of a show.
“The Surface of a Stone is Always in Motion” is on view at The Alice Wilds (900 S. Fifth St., Suite 102) through Aug. 4.
OPENINGS:
Tom Berenz: A Conversation on Contemporary Painting Thursday, July 26 Haggerty Museum of Art 530 N. 13th St.
Ben Grant will moderate a panel discussion about contemporary painting presented in conjunction with Heavy Socks—Tom Berenz’s contribution to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists 2017 exhibition. The panel will include Doug Singsen, who wrote the essay on Berenz’s work in the exhibition’s catalogue. Starting at 6 p.m., this panel discussion is free and open to the public.
‘Homely (Part Two)’ July 28-Sept. 1 Portrait Society Gallery 207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 526
“Homely (Part Two),” the second part of a summer-long project begins with beer, wine, snacks and a guided walk-through of the exhibit on Saturday, July 28, from 3-5 p.m. This is a collection of photographs by photojournalist Angela Peterson, who followed two Milwaukee families headed by single mothers struggling to find housing and keep their children in the same schools. The photographs, Portrait Society says, “provide an intimate portrait of these families as the eldest sons moved through their senior years toward graduation.”
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