Hot on the heels of the gallery’s previous exhibition of found-object master Haim Steinbach, Nicole Wermers, a younger London artist, incorporates comparable strategies, but to lesser effect. Her latest show features sculptures using everyday fixtures and furnishings to investigate the ways in which commercial design defines our sense of place by infusing it with cultural meaning. It’s a worthy project, but Wermers’s aesthetic is so austere that viewers may feel shut out. Her work doesn’t lack visual impact, but in her case, prolonged looking doesn’t yield deeper appreciation of her point.
One wall is hung with a set of sculptures in which Wermers pairs enlarged, inverted restroom hand dryers with scaled-down versions of ventilation ducts. The idea, presumably, is to establish a circuitous formal and functional interplay—a kind of robot war, with humanity caught in the crossfire.
Arranged across the floor is a group of large fabric awnings rolled up to resemble decorative columns, though the gallery’s comparison to Constantin Brancusi’s modernist masterpiece Endless Column is a stretch. Imagine these unfurled, and you might find yourself pondering the history and character of humankind’s ideological and economic struggles over territory—or just wish you were spending an afternoon at Jacob Riis Park.