The Brooklyn Rail

For Springs Projects second ever exhibition, Prototype 1.0, guest curator Tomas Vu has envisioned the inception and early stages of artistic exploration as a crucial point of creative fluidity. In his curatorial statement he declares: “The relationship between object-hood and origin—the notion of the prototype—can be engaged not only with the physical models but also (with) the modeling of ideas, concepts, and dreams.” He follows through extensively on this idea by presenting a kaleidoscopic collection of artist’s models for social sculptures, drawings, assemblages, videos, print editions, and paintings. This rambling effort is effectively anchored at its core by a series of low, interlocking, circular tables, designed and fabricated by Vu himself in unfinished plywood. The curator, then, sets up a prototypical staging to underscore his intent.

A number of models for realized or unrealized sculptural and architectural installations populate these circular plateaus, including Michael Joo’s No Ideas but in things (Crystal Lamp 1) (2018), in two-way mirrored Plexiglas, which resembles a modernist pavilion for the “world reflecting” suggested by his William Carlos Williams title quotation, Leandro Vazquez’s Untitled (2023) a shelter-like dome made of miniature rubber tires, and Predrag Dimitrijevic’s Untitled (2024), a crystalline lamp-like structure in paper. As if to avoid the foolish consistency of a formal trajectory, Vu juxtaposes these quasi-architectural works with quirky anthropomorphic sculptures exemplified by Kiki Smith’s polychromed pigeon cutout, Birdie Bird (2023), Isami Ching’s Untitled (2010–24), a foam and bondo hare with a toy car grafted to its butt, and Valerie Hammond’s Daphne 2 (2024), a split head mold delicately formed of paper and wasp nest material.

The morphological and material indeterminacy of these works bolsters the curator’s proposition that lateral thinking in aesthetics can find its most fertile ground in a conceptual “terrain vague.” Vu furthers and problematizes his selections by making the point, throughout the installation, that a lot of creative elbow room exists between different material iterations and an artist’s consistent vision. An excellent example of this is Hanneline Røgeberg’s Petroleum Soul Pile-Up (2015), in which she switches between an image of a petroleum stain in traditional oil painting and the same image painted on mounds of sheepskin strewn haphazardly on the floor nearby. Another good example can be seen between Wang Xu’s surreal oil painting Land to Sea (2024) and his stone sculpture Pickle Dream (2024). The painting seems to depict a figurative group hoisting bodies by the seashore, while the sculpture shapes a deer-like fetish, lying prone on its back in a submissive pose. Both imply a sense of poignant resignation—exactly to what remains undetermined.

Reference to drawing figures prominently in the selected works, and appropriately so, considering the show’s concept, since drawing traditionally has been used as a means to test visual iterations toward a variety of ends. Amanda Millet-Sorsa’s Untitled (2024), a monotype print on paper, is an expressive palimpsest of quotations, resembling cryptic cave painting missives from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, while Raphaela Melsohn is represented by Metal Sketchworks (2024), a series of stacked and framed etchings that seem to be working drawings for potential sculptural installations. It’s important to note, too, that the curator has long been Creative Director of Columbia University’s Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies, where an emphasis on creative improvisation with materials and methods is an abiding concern. Consider Sarah Sze’s Notepad (2008), an edition produced at the center, in this context. Wonderfully wrought from a lined notepad, its pages alternately looped and hanging loose, it is laser-cut and lithographed into a series of rectangles that together look something like a deconstructed fire escape. Another example of unexpectedly creative printmaking is Korakrit Arunanondchai’s There’s a word I’m trying to remember or a feeling I’m about to have (a distracted path towards extinction) (2021), an Epsom pigment print with cut, collaged, and bleached black denim and faux fur. The artist’s “feeling (they’re) about to have” would be an apt subtitle to this show, considering its emphasis on incipient form.

Atypical approaches to painting can be seen here as well. Lisa Sigal’s Untitled (2024), is composed of rhomboid forms painted on a mesh support, while Cate Holt’s left out funny (2024) links two misshapen canvas rectangles with a multicolored umbilical made of a child’s jump rope. Similarly unusual, Nathan Catlin’s Lantern (2023) contains a lamp constructed of actual leaded glass inserts, depending on the beak of a bird resembling a trickster magpie. Radical juxtapositions in assemblage can likewise be seen in Jon Kessler’s Untitled (2017), in which a Barbie doll is bedecked in a flatscreen monitor tutu and posed atop a vintage CRT TV that broadcasts an image of what seems to be a video tech’s workshop. In Jeffrey Meris’s Untitled (2023), a found object sculpture that channels Joan Miró’s surrealist personages but with more quotidian result, all is precariously balanced atop a plastic water jug.

In the gallery’s project room are two compelling video installations. Beau Willimon’s Phases (2024) places an odd assortment of vintage television sets on the floor which together present a cycle of images of earthbound mortality combined with celestial bodies in disintegrating, expressionist video. Opposite is Jennifer Nuss’s Circus Master (2021), in which a Harry Smith-like animation composes its own little world of magic and mystery. Meanwhile, her Naturalist (2023) video shows an animation of a woman collating insects in a scrapbook set to a haunting refrain from what sounds like an Appalachian folk singer, an interesting co-coincidence, considering Smith’s groundbreaking compendium of American folk songs.

There are many more intriguing works to contemplate in this exhibition, which provides a comprehensive overview of the many ways modelling and prototyping can jump-start the imaginative flow. Digression in method is typically viewed askance as wasting time in a pragmatic culture at large, yet the essence of the pragmatic encounter is the ability to modify one’s response with each new experience. At Springs Projects Vu has critically, yet playfully, unpacked such an evolutionary recalibration.