Something is afoot at Apparatus Projects, namely the beguiling “The door you open is determined by how you twist the knob. The room you enter is determined by how you open the door,” including artworks by Yani aviles, Mira Dayal, and Micah Schippa steeped in the delirious so-muchness of things and not-enoughness of words.
Enter (no knob-twisting required) to Schippa’s standout, a hammered copper bell nesting in a gash in the gallery wall, romantically contracted to remain in place as long as the building stands. Linger for aviles’s looping sound piece, bells bathed in atmospheric noise, emanating from a closed door (this knob doesn’t twist either, I tried). An army of clues accompanies this vaguely spiritual chorus—a box of leaves “shipped west” (aviles), facsimiles of artwork glimpsed in apartment listings (Dayal), clock guts dissolved in fake tears (Schippa). The result: a show about the lives and languages of things—everything from talisman to coincidence, all phenomena speaking in a perhaps divine register. “Signs have always been the language of the Gods,” reads an apt Hölderlin quote in the exhibition text.
Installation view, “The door you open . . .” Apparatus Projects, 2022Credit: Julian Van Der Moere
I’m reminded of Nabokov’s 1948 story “Symbols and Signs,” whose protagonist is afflicted with “referential mania,” delusions that the external world reflects his inner life, causing the devotion of “every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.” Nabokov’s objects control, the exhibition’s objects supplicate. The room, after all, is determined by how you open the door.
“The door you open . . .”Through 1/15/23: Sat-Sun noon-4 PM, Apparatus Projects, 1524 S. Western, Ste. 406, apparatusprojects.com
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