Phillip Maisel: As It Lays

Gregory Lind Gallery

San Francisco, CA

July 13 - August 25, 2018

Recently, I heard someone say that she had seen a show—meaning, she’d scrolled through images on her computer. In As it Lays, Phillip Maisel puts paid to the idea that such a thing is even possible by constructing a body of work that simply cannot be fully understood in reproduction: demanding, as it were, a face-to-face experience. Though one can say this is required for all art, in this case, this assertion is more than a fatuous truism. Maisel’s kryptonite for the presumed power of the screen to reveal all comes in the form of photographic images of collage elements arranged into still lifes in shallow space, onto which additional collaged elements are added — creating a diabolical shift from three to two dimensions and back again. The experience of being in the same room with these works is enjoyable but vaguely unsettling. It is simply not possible to tell what is an actual piece of material — cut paper or transparent gel— placed on the surface of an image, and what is an image of the cut shape, photographed in a studio set-up, to cast slender shadows that cunningly deceive. Consequently, the only way to distinguish between pictures of objects and actual objects is to peer at the surface, sliding your eyes across it with the kind of anxious attention usually reserved for checking one’s own appearance in a mirror.

- excerpt from Maria Porges’ review in Square Cylinder

Press Release PDF

REVIEW: Maria Porges for Square Cylinder