Interference beating is a musical term for the pulsating vibration that occurs when two pitches go in and out of coincidence – creating a periodic variation in amplitude as the pitches approach unison then diverge. This kind of beating occurs across multiple scales and mediums in the work of Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss – who will be exhibiting together at 303 Gallery from March 7th through April 16th. Okiishi and Mauss met at Cooper Union in 1999 and married when it became possible to do so in 2011. Nick regularly appears in Ken’s early films – including playing Telly in Okiishi’s uncanny “remake” of Kids, Telly and Casper, when they were both students at Cooper. At 303 Gallery, their overlapping sensibilities manifest through formal and synaesthetic interlacing. Viewed together, the works betray a shared delight in chiasmic inversion – top/bottom, front/back, flatscreen/deepimage, opaque/transparent, surface/absorption.
Mauss’ mirror paintings hover between the receding depth of the mirror and the surface of the paint in a way that bewilders any sense of ground. At first, the work seems to be painted on the front side of the mirror-glass – but really the painting occurs on the reverse underside of a glass pane, with a mirror coating added only as the final layer. A single plane of “painting” made up of latticed marks emerges from a pool of mirrored light, so that the tangled paint seems to float in midair or on a thin membrane between the glass and the mounting. The mirror coating brings out unexpected reactions (flares, blackouts, solarizations) and the finished painting lies within the mirror, not on its surface. We find ourselves doubled and fragmented in the oblique reflection of the glass. Abstracted from the folk-art technique of “reverse glass painting,” this is a kind of painting a tergo (from behind).
In Mauss' mural work, the mirror paintings are embedded in a large multi-part work that includes large drawings and paintings on paper and mylar, along with etchings in fabric – creating a versatile display of the interconnected processes that make up the seams of Mauss’ work. As this variegated tapestry shows – Mauss opens his work to maximal contamination by performative, gestural, and citational transmissions. Extimate traces of the outside on the inside and the inside on the outside are multiplied in the work. There are traces of the process of sketching a body (including motion blurs of tangled lineation, tracking the speed of strokes and the movement of bodies), of scaling depth (through the stacking of layers, screens, veils, and fabrics), but also traces of the viewer and the viewing environment (as external light and distance don’t just ‘effect’ but also make the work—certain etchings turn on or off based on lighting conditions, while the viewer can be dimly reflected in the mirrors).
In all these tracings, drawing is played out as an endless prefiguration or study, recalling Watteau’s sketches where heterogenous motifs appear on a single sheet, and one model is shown from competing vantage points. Like the nudes of Muybridge and Duchamp – spatial extension is always just barely syncing up to temporal progression – leading to lags and jumps, the asynchronous drama which Mauss has deciphered in the films of Werner Schroeter (where lip-syncing tends to be dragged out of sync).
Mauss often works on two layers at once (mylar and paper) to draft competing but proximate gestures, and to highlight zones of intersection and divergence. At 303 Gallery, this process is exposed to the viewer not so much for the sake of transparency as reversibility – maximizing contingency, reactability, and contamination. Mauss’ work is steeped in the history of ornamental modernisms, which heighten bodily and synthetic complexity, serving as a rebuke to austere and flatlined conceptions of aesthetics.
Mauss’ fabric etchings, embedded in the larger work, are made in the tradition of devoré (literally: to devour) – a process of chemically etching into velvet or satin so that the surface falls away, revealing a transparent drawing suspended in the fabric and opening onto the reverse-side of the fabric. The technique furthers Mauss’ insistence on the extimate trace and its irrational transfer and layering on multi-sided, reversible supports. It as if a worm or moth had chewed through the surface of the silk to forge arabesque and chaotic lineations.
Okiishi is showing a 2015 work from his iconic series of paintings, gesture/data, alongside new experiments in the relationship between painting, screens, and brain space. The pulsing feedback loop of gesture/data chime with Mauss’ mirroring in complex ways. The paintings are composed of abstract strokes on two strobing HD screens. The screens play digital files made of wavy VHS transfers of found tapes that produce moiré-inflected patterns and bright blocks of color. The background video as support surface includes images that document stages in the making of the opposing screen’s painting. The paintings coincide and diverge with their own strokes – along an adjacent axis of horizontal symmetry between monitors and along the z-axis between the screen and the paint. An infrathin membrane between screen and paint can only be discerned in space when the screen “turns off” in the flicker of its strobing.
The use of the screen as a kind of ghost for retracing mnemonic traces appears across Okiishi’s work – including a new screen painting shown for the first time at 303 Gallery, in which vibrant paint floats on top of imagery from Instagram’s “recommended” videos panel: synthetically smooth skin, advertisements for self-care, and the bodily zones of algorithmically induced artificial influencers are swiped through in changing scales and dimensions.
Also exhibited are Okiishi’s new ceramic works that disfigure the relation between hands, screens, print, and paint. Imprints of small hands and phones along with the scrawled tracings of fingers are cemented in ceramics creating a strange archeological crime scene of our technological evolution. Mnemonic traces are always redoubled in Okiishi’s work so that you cannot tell the difference between authentic original and simulacral remake – cannot tell an abstract gesture from a mechanically reproduced jest. The ceramics are painted with shimmering abstract and calligraphic marks made by painting in iridescent glaze. This glaze (made of liquified mother-of-pearl) overlays the clay ground with a bio-luminescent sheen that doubles as a kind of “organic” screen. These post-digital ceramics hauntingly convey the new ways our digits and fingers are becoming sedimented and embedded in our screens and tablets – in a manner both archaic and novel – perhaps, hinting at Okiishi's studies with the historian Fredrich Kittler, whose late work closely examined the way that the hand inflects our technology, but also the way our technology inflects and programs our hand.
Other ceramic works by Okiishi show images bathed in red, neon, and iridescent colors that crack and smear across the clay surface. These tablets are something like ceramic “prints” that remain frozen in the midst of a strange developmental process. Recasting the digital in the archaic, Okiishi has printed random image files in glaze onto an image-membrane, which is baked onto the ceramic, then painted over again with glaze. These layers crystallize in works that scramble the sequence of marks, pigments, and technologies. But they also point to the way the modern subject is composed by chemical processes that run awry, bleed over, and shatter from intensities of saturation.
– Felix Bernstein