Adam Putnam/Seth Kelly
Jason Murison
In this two-person summer exhibition at Derek Eller that slices the gallery in two, Seth Kelly and Adam Putnam engage being and nothingness from opposing directions. On one side of the dividing wall, Seth Kelly?s sculpture The Disinherited, a large globe?with a hint of cartoon eyeball about it?is cradled in foam-cast tree roots, and stares directly back at us as we enter the gallery. Kelly?s work deals with immensity. The globe is a topographical map of the galaxy, with the sun represented by a carved hole in the center and an exoskeleton depicting the orbits of the nine planets creating its globular shell. The sculpture looks like the top of a staff, suggesting some sort of quasi-mystical or spiritual significance?and that is exactly where Kelly wants to lead us. The tree roots conjure the medieval ideal of being a way to call on the dead. The spirit of Kelly?s imagery seems to be the exact opposite of Kubrick?s giant floating fetus at the end of 2001: Space Odyssey. He counters Kubrick?s upbeat renewal of life by offering a fatalistic view: life as an insignificant hell in a universe so immensely large.
On the other side of the dividing wall, we see Adam Putnam?s creepy video of a dark shadow living in an empty room. The video is the inverse of Kelly?s sculpture. Rather than immensity, he is interested in the intimacy of spaces. Putnam?s video has the feeling of a Japanese horror film where rooms drip black water, or a videotape that terrorizes us through inexplicable means. The deep film-like space of the video has an interesting relationship to his drawings of abandoned, ruined factory buildings. These are sites that once had a thriving industry and now sit empty like a body without soul. In the video Untitled (Shadow Room III), Putnam is now in an empty space, and, by adjusting his camera, he catches a lost soul alive and dancing. The darkness actually waivers and spins, like the stars you see when rubbing your closed eyes. Putnam, a ghost catcher, has found a presence that is not a presence.
