![]() March–April 2022.Ībout the author: Tom McGlynn is an artist and writer based in the NYC area. Osmos Address, 50 West 1st Street, East Village, New York, NY. Artists include Michelle Araujo, Larry Greenberg, Adam Simon, William Stone, and Jude Tallichet. “Mind The Gaps,” co-curated by Adam Simon and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. Maybe the affective author isn’t dead, but just on an extended gap year. Such connotative fissures opportune a contemplative pause to the relentless consistency of our contemporary social compact. Their commonality exists in that there are more complex conceptual gaps at work in each of their artworks than between them. What their errant combination ultimately reveals, however, is that these artists have a lot more in common than any curatorial imperative might impose. Mind The Gaps co-curators Adam Simon and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz set out to get lost in forking paths of associative rather than denotative meanings with this show. Both works revel in the conceit of their artifice while simultaneously sounding elegiac notes. The grandfather clock’s face is a literal projection of a pocket watch held below and in front of its cabinet while Skin (2018) presents a chunk of thickly laminated plywood faced with an actual tree bark cladding. These works resonate wistfulness for the tactile and handmade sensual in both their anecdotal and their abstract qualities. Each are impeccably crafted in wood and found objects, both mechanical and organic. Stone presents a fabrication of an ersatz grandfather clock and a hypertrophic tree bark souvenir. A selection of paintings by Larry Greenberg, Michelle Araujo and Adam Simon occupies the right-hand wall while the sculptures of William Stone and Jude Tallichet inhabit the wall and floor opposite. Schwab (where anarchist radicals such as Emma Goldman once congregated) has suffused its rooms with an aura of independent thinking. Perhaps its historic function as a turn-of-the-century saloon run by German immigrant Justus H. ![]() ![]() The gemütlich ground floor environment of Osmos is conducive to a congenial gathering of disparate artistic temperaments. The curatorial statement of non-intent leaves viewers to “puzzle out their own version of coherence.” ![]() “Mind the Gaps” at the Osmos Address on East 1st Street takes as its curatorial premise that it has no consistent curatorial premise and so offers a welcome respite to the incessant connecting of dots of contemporary life. For artists the price of admission can be prohibitive, as lateral thinking tends to chafe against fitting in. In this light, McLuhan’s famous koan “the medium is the message” wasn’t meant so much as a celebration of the electronic global village as it was a warning against the communication-occluding nature of its undifferentiated membership. With Mobius-strip news cycles and continuous “chat” ever rattling, propulsively glancing interaction has supplanted effective back-and-forth. Contributed by Tom McGlynn / Totalizing themes have come to condition everyday social relations largely due to an inescapable sense of contemporary interconnectedness.
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