In “First Alienation,” printed matter and machine vision come together in a clearly human context at Timeshare, a co-curated gallery run by six artists in Lincoln Heights. The earliest work included in the show is Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 16mm film, Swamp. Looping every 6 minutes on a large black TV displaying a prominent “TRINITRON” logo, the film follows the views and voices of a couple tramping through reeds in the swamplands of New Jersey. The blurred, swaying reeds give way to the next piece in the show, Kelley O’Leary’s Mars Door, a 22 by 30 screen print on newsprint mounted on wood board that features a “door” that seems to have been constructed by humans on Mars but is instead an idea we project upon an early image of a space carved out by winds. Opposite O’Leary’s work are seven small pieces by Chase Barnes, each of them a “debezeled BNRV300 e-paper display,” or an image quickly captured on a deconstructed reading tablet during the process of content loading. The images include a blazing boardroom table, a stone tower window, empty shelves, and “Richard’s model of the F-14 Tomcat.” At the center of these digitally produced works is Anthony Discenza’s Burn Rate, the only paper in sight, which, upon closer viewing, is in fact a suite of 72 synthetic images printed on Fuji glass paper. This show sits beautifully in a space that also houses Ricoh machines, placing their service manuals alongside gallery catalogs and artist books on the permanent bookshelves at the corner of the gallery, where press releases in Esperanto feature four different cover images, one for each artist featured in this exhibition. The viewer senses in the show the fleeting, iterative nature of both language and image, especially in the face of technological and environmental ruptures over time. A press release in English may have helped to re-establish the solid ground offered by the sculptural elements of the show, from the television to the mound of photographs that can be touched and rearranged. The show is far less alienated than it proposes to be, and this is a relief.
First Alienation
Timeshare
3526 N. Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90031
On view through April 26, 2025
