An old riddle asks: What grows the more you take away from it?Answer: A hole.The hole in this riddle, defined by that which it isn’t, is a good metaphor for the works in “See sun, think shadow,” a strong group show currently on view at Gladstone Gallery. Most of the pieces in the exhibition exploit the tension between an object or idea and the counterpoint that delineates it.Curated by Simone Battisti, the exhibition takes its name from the last line of a short poem by Louis Zukofsky, “anew #21.” Zukofsky was the foremost member of the Objectivists, a loose group of second-wave modernists who sought to take the grandiosity out of poetry by focusing with sincerity on small everyday moments. Although the formal and thematic aims of Objectivism don’t seem overly pertinent to the show as a whole, most of the works in it demonstrate the sincere understatement the movement espoused. They also introduce a great deal of subtle humor.Amy Sillman’s “Triscuits” embodies all these points. The semi-autobiographical video revolves around a university faculty party to which Sillman, in residency at the school, is invited. The story, which is quite funny, uses the hole as pervasive motif: It appears as a metaphor for female reproduction and intercourse; for the missed connections between people, as in disjointed conversations at a dinner party; and finally, for a more intangible sense of something missing in individuals’ lives. The video monitor, recessed into the gallery wall, offers a formal complement to the work’s content.Elsewhere in the exhibition, the light-by-way-of-dark theme is used to represent other types of subverted dichotomous relationships. In Liz Deschene’s “Shift/Rise,” for example, a silver-toned photogram acts more like a mirror than an abstract photograph; viewers’ relationship to the piece changes as their focus quickly switches from a formal appraisal to looking at their reflection. Apostolos Georgiou’s untitled painting depicts two male figures negotiating a wall, one facing front, ready to hop down on the viewer’s side of the barrier, the other leaning over the other side, as if to throw himself over, perhaps to his death; the work ultimately resists narrative altogether. And in Nora Schultz “Window Blinds,” an oversized set of venetian blinds is suspended nowhere near a window, calling into question not just their purpose but their very identity.Hanging next to Nora Schultz’s work, Lucas Blalock’s dense photo “IIII” shows the ghostly remains of various quotidian objects on a studio table; largely —albeit lazily — Photoshopped out, the objects appear as virtual shells of their former selves. Blalock’s characteristic play between analogue photography and over-dramatic post-production dissolves the line between authenticity and artifice, demonstrating the inadequacy of this distinction in discussions of photography and replacing it with a more painterly debate about abstraction versus figuration.The show also includes two works by Jessica Dickinson, whose practice involves making gouache paintings and then “tracing” their topography to create new pieces in the form of negative images of the originals. The two pieces on view are from the same series: one a painting, the other a tracing. They are not complementary, however, introducing a tension between them.This tension is what the show is really about — not the lines that divide the sun from its shadow but whether or not such oppositions open the artistic discourse into more complex questions. For the artists in “See sun, and think shadow,” this liminal area still proves fertile ground.“See sun, and think shadow” runs from June 23 through July 29, 2016, at Gladstone Gallery
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