Glen Fogel has a lot of feelings. And he finds traces of them in objects and images of personal importance—his late grandmother’s car, diamond engagement rings belonging to family members, handwritten love letters he received as a teenager.
In his new show, seven flat screens hang in a wide arc, each showing a different view in an empty suburban home. The cameras pan across kitchens, bedrooms, living spaces and the garage. They tilt up or rotate upside down, rolling across ceilings and down the walls. The synchronized movements appear mechanical, even robotic, imparting a sense of inhuman alienation in keeping with the cold aridity of the recently vacated house.
Combined with a white-noise roar, the camerawork in the spare white rooms evokes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the once lived-in home seems like a sterile spaceship hurtling into parts unknown. At one moment, the lights go out in the house and in the gallery itself to reveal the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets adhering to the ceiling in the artist’s childhood bedroom.
Elsewhere, six pencil drawings reproduce photographs of a handsome young blond man whose clothing and hair situate him in the 1990s. Their collective title, “First Love as Drawn by Second Love,” suggests their significance and the gallery literature confirms them as Fogel’s portraits of his high-school boyfriend rendered by another ex, the painter Benjamin Kress. By farming out the labor of creating these ostensibly generic and anonymous images, Fogel redoubles their emotional weight.