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Thursday, February 25, 2010

Visual Art Currently Hanging: Sol Hashemi at Gallery4Culture

Posted by Jen Graves on Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 8:49 AM

Sol Hashemi is often organizing. He lines up a grid of photographs of various ways to stack a set of stools, and the stools are suddenly transformed into something interplanetary by this new, perfect, and totally simple and pointless purpose. What happens in the art is so humble.

Detail

The show at 4Culture is full of these little transformative moments, prepared for internet people, people used to organizing and sifting and joking and connecting. Distances collapse. A bright star hangs in a dark sky next to a chandelier. They're easy friends. Tree branches coated in glitter grow in a basement, up toward the sprinkler head. Why not? It's the similarities between things, their startling closeness, that makes you realize how alive they are, not their differences.

Hashemi's art feels like domestic archaeological beauty, the stuff of basements and attics and backyards that haven't been kept up and have grown strange all on their own. Places waiting patiently to be looked at.

A little slide projector on the floor, placed close to the wall so it projects a tiny image, is pointed at a postcard that's already sparkling. It doesn't need the projection, which only comes out white anyway. But the light and the postcard ramp each other up, even if you never get to know what the image is that's being imported in from another time and place. You might want the image but you don't need it. You have this glowing thing right at your feet.