Standard Size

Molly M Brandt 

Jory Drew 

THE LEROY NEIMAN CENTER GALLERY

August 19 – September 14

“the light is used as material, and that it has a physical presence as such, and that space is solid and filled and never empty”. –James Turrell 

Visiting Standard Size is like the process of dreaming.

Walking in to the space, which is a single room about 20 by 20 feet, the viewer is confronted with the space itself –literally. At first glance, the gallery is almost empty. One finds themselves walking through thin air, until, slowly, and gradually, the emptiness is activated with both natural light (if you’re lucky enough to visit the show during the early evening), and with Drew’s projection light. The single room that was empty at first is now a sculpture itself.

The light, coming from the full-bleed windows on the street side of the gallery, pass through the cement blocks Brandt has so intricately yet with a nonchalant act placed on the floor, only to drag us once again to the projection from the middle of the space, onto the wall opposing the windows. The 3x5 photograph that is blocking some of the light being projected onto the wall, is similar in architecture to how the busy modernist-downtown-Chicago-street plays with the sunlight that falls through and upon the cement blocks.

Pieces in the show are all stripped down to their bones, their utilitarian means, which, in some cases, is blocked by means of light (the essential matter to activate perception in the eye). Through this reduction of all things unessential, they draw attention to those that are invisible. Light is one of the main mediums in this collaborative show. It is one of the collaborators. It helps turn this show into a celestial phenomena –one that is of the space and not the form, for once.  

Brandt’s cement blocks are the building blocks for most structures within a metropolitan city –Chicago being the ideal city for the modernist utopia. In this space, they are abstracted from all utilitarian contexts, and appear as a mere source for visual pleasure. These hard, cold blocks of concrete, are excluding. What, fascinatingly, happens through this exclusion, is the emphasis of the void. The viewer is abandoned with all that is in their heads, both about the work and not –the show becomes heavy. All this enables the show to acts as a counter media, which, like the exhibition description reads, “challenges the commercial distribution of photography.”