Step 13 at Dvir Gallery

Artists: Miroslaw Balka, Orna Bromberg, Latifa Echakhch, Simon Fujiwara, Matan Mittwoch, Jonathan Monk, Moshe Ninio, Ariel Schlesinger, Pavel Wolberg

Exhibition title: Step 13

Venue: Dvir Gallery, Brussels, Belgium

Date: May 9 – June 22, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Dvir Gallery

‘Step 13’ explores the virtual depth of a flat object – here, the LED display of an iPad device – through a pre-programmed photographic process where the digital camera, equipped with a macro lens and facing a lit tablet, always enlarges a detail from the previous capture in a series.

As steps add up, a sequence is created which will ultimately lead to the ‘collapse’ of visual data, bringing us back to the place where we started. Identical in size, the 15 pictures in the series are framed and hung side-by-side, in the sequential order in which they were taken. Each features an abstract-looking formation of horizontal and vertical markings – a faint geometry that seems to evolve from one picture to the next. Yet the first and final captures in the series, framing it from left to right, present a nearly identical surface of white monochrome. With the camera positioned to face the tablet, the two devices are paired and programmed to work in tandem, with each action triggering another in the opposite device. Beginning from the representation of a white surface as emitted from the tablet screen, the camera responds by recording the image in 4 times the size and sending it back to the iPad. The iPad then displays this on its screen – that is, a portion of its own LED screen as previously captured by the camera and split into the pixel triad of red, green, and blue – only to be capture again by the camera’s macro lens, using the very same ratio. This back and-forth feedback among the devices – displaying, recording, feeding and back again – proceeds until, in the 14th step of the process, we reach something of a breaking point: as we dig deeper into the virtual depths of the screen – that is, zooming into the increasingly enlarged image of the LED display’s electroluminescent lamps – we reach the point where the two systems nullify the data accumulated throughout the process; by repeatedly parsing through the camera’s output, we revert to the white of the initial frame, as if going 13 steps backward. As in several of Mittwoch’s other photographic series, Step 13 puts into action a regulated, recursive process aimed at pushing widely-available display and photographic technologies to their limit. By coming full circle and exhausting the spectrum of their functioning protocol – one designed to capture and propagate the things and sights of the world around us – he sheds light on the ambiguity of such technology in its most basic components.

Matan Mittwoch, Step-13 [I-XV], 2016, inkjet prints on Baryte paper, 67.2 x 51.2 cm (each), edition of 3 + 2 AP

Step 13, 2019, exhibition view, Dvir Gallery, Brussels

Matan Mittwoch, Step-13 [II], 2016, inkjet print on Baryte paper, 67.2 x 51.2 cm, edition of 3 + 2 AP

Step 13, 2019, exhibition view, Dvir Gallery, Brussels

Matan Mittwoch, Step-13 [VII], 2016, inkjet print on Baryte paper, 67.2 x 51.2 cm, edition of 3 + 2 AP

Matan Mittwoch, Step-13 [XIII], 2016, inkjet print on Baryte paper, 67.2 x 51.2 cm, edition of 3 + 2 AP

Jonathan Monk, All the possible ways of switching 8 torches on one at a time (silver up-lighting), 2013, framed and mounted c-print, glass shelf, eight silver MAG-Lite torches 200 x 140 x 20 cm, unique

Latifa Echakhch, Noises and missing words, 2018, ink on blank newspaper, 50 x 66 cm, unique

Orna Bromberg, Untitled, 2012, gouache on paper, 39 x 40 cm, unique

Latifa Echakhch, Noises and missing words, 2018, ink on blank newspaper, 50 x 66 cm, unique

Ariel Schlesinger, Togetherness, 2007, wood, gas balloon, wire

Latifa Echakhch, Noises and missing words, 2018, ink on blank newspaper, 50 x 66 cm, unique

Orna Bromberg, Untitled, 2012, gouache on paper, 34.5 x 37 cm, unique

Latifa Echakhch, Noises and missing words, 2018, ink on blank newspaper, 50 x 66 cm, unique

Orna Bromberg, Untitled, 2012, gouache on paper, 39.5 x 40 cm, unique

Step 13, 2019, exhibition view, Dvir Gallery, Brussels

Simon Fujiwara, It’s a Small World (Future Gandhi Napping in a Pavilion Designed by Frank Gehry), 2019, clay, cotton, metal, 50 x 25 x 30 cm, unique in a series