Seth Price, “Hell Has Everything”

Considered a canonical figure of early-21st century art by some, Seth Price has had a busy several years since his last show at the gallery, touring his work though Europe in a series of institutional surveys. His multivalent (one could argue arcane) practice could be described as Neo-Naumanesque, insofar as Price’s objects often evoke the idea of the body gone missing—though not without leaving some sort of trace. His work has included close-up photos of the human epidermis in the style reminiscent of NASA satellite mosaics, as well as the outline of a discarded bomber jacket vacuum-formed in plastic—efforts, which, according to his champions, convey the evanescence globalism’s decentralized power structure and stockpiles of wealth zapping across digital space. Whatever the case, his work is reliably provocative in an elegant sort of way, as in the centerpiece here: A screen mounted flat against the ceiling, playing video of a robotic camera scanning the skin of a squid in microscopic detail.