The Brooklyn Rail

When I came to see Diurnal, Jordan Loeppky-Kolesnik’s solo exhibition at Art Lot, the works on view were inactive, immersed in daytime hibernation. Fenced off in an enclosure of the open-air art space, all the artworks are viewable from the street and yet shrouded in a certain type of invisibility reserved for things of use or of former use permanently affixed in urban spaces. With some searching, the sculptures come into focus: a constellation of orb-like metal protrusions peeking through the gravel, a seemingly abandoned concrete construction, so low that they could be mistaken for a displaced curb, and a lonely set of flood lights perched on a scratched wall. Taken together, the pieces coalesce into a presence that slides off the edges of conscious perception.

The title of the exhibition, Diurnal, directly engages the idea of a cyclical rhythm that regulates the behavior of biological beings. The three sculptures (all 2024) comprising the show exercise their own temporal cycles, ranging from nearly absolute stasis to sporadic eruption of energy expenditure. These internal patterns, however, are out of sync, activating at different times, which results in a bizarre, uncoordinated ecology, a garden of misalignments. Or, if one were to shift attention to the immobile, the artworks nearly always coincide in their stillness. Their dormant periods are almost invariably coincident.

Vessel, the piece that frames the entrance, is a ground-level concrete structure, delineating a perforated archway with three entryways. The low-rise blocks of concrete seem unassuming, a trace of unfinished foundation or forgotten debris. Placed directly across the gate of the lot, the composition acts as a valve: it collects the flow of visitors’ movements, directing them sideways through one of the extended arms of the pathway. The central semicircle draws a parallel with a human blood vessel, as does the very material: the artist infused the concrete with iron oxide, a compound that colors blood red and is used extensively as a pigment in industrial processes. In establishing this connection between the human body and the sculpture, which takes on the role of the lot’s minimal infrastructure, Loeppky-Kolesnik saturates the work with a sense of animacy that seems to infect the larger notion of landscape architecture invoked in the form of the piece (in the exhibition text, Coco Klockner reveals how the arched shape was lifted from an unrealized garden design by Gertrude Jekyll, a twentieth-century British visionary in the field). Between its function, the echo of flesh, and placement in the lot’s layout, Vessel suggests a possibility of synthetic liveliness, performed by and emerging from systems of infrastructure that support, frame, and condition the activities of organic life from plants to humans.

One of the pathway’s arms leads to Manifold, a scattered configuration of metal rings tightly enclosing spheres at their centers. The work seems frozen, impervious, evocative of an armature but refusing a function. Each protrusion at times emits smoke, filtered through the narrow gap between the ring and the sphere. As evinced by the pattern of emission, the metal nodules are in fact connected underground, constituting a system of pathways that, much like the eponymous manifold device, redirect gaseous substances through its pipes and orifices. The work needs to be activated manually, so its cycle is irregular, mandated by external forces.

On the opposite end of the lot, a set of three flood lights is perched high above the ground. 36 Lenses is a work with the most apparent temporal rhythm in Diurnal. Plugged into a power source, the device turns on at dusk and pours blazing white light through each of its thirty-six openings. After some uninterrupted activity, it switches off for another long period of dormancy. This cycle, triggered at the transitional moment of the sunset, stands in contrast to the show’s title, as if it were meant to subvert the fixed meaning of the binary of day and night. Much like Loeppky-Kolesnik’s previous New York presentation at the SculptureCenter, the piece throws into question the familiar nature of diurnal and nocturnal cycles.

The three panels of 36 Lenses, encased in black glass, overlook the lot, not unlike a surveillance camera. Here, a single lens is replaced with thirty-six apertures. As noted in the press release, this profusion of puncture holes points to the innumerable photoreceptors of insects’ compound eyes, conjuring a non-human mode of vision. What’s unnerving about this insect-like gaze is how it replicates the impossibility of eliciting an intelligible response from such a creature despite our certitude of being seen. Yet the work doesn’t imitate any organism directly; if anything, its mimicry is aimed at urban infrastructure. Without belying its nature, 36 Lenses suggests itself as a form bestowed with some animacy. As it oscillates between its two built-in functions—light and rest—it stakes out the uncanny terrain where the orders of biology and built environment collide, giving rise to zoomorphized projections of organic life.

If Diurnal is a garden—as its manifold forms, cycles, and chemical compounds imply—it is one that primarily follows a logic of enclosure, wherein the land becomes property and all activities and behaviors are to some degree governed. However, the distinct quality of this urban ground is that it looks past the organic, zeroing in on the machinery of subtle, if purposeless, control. A distant echo of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties: Fake Estates (1974), for which he purchased and therefore preserved unusable microplots of property, Diurnal foregrounds devices of land ownership, shifting from Matta-Clark’s symbolic markers to technological apparatuses that define and organize urban spaces by imposing on embodied perception.¹ In their oblivious relationship to the sparse plant matter, Loeppky-Kolesnik’s trio of sculptures is unable to care for anything but itself. Instead, through their synthetic and pointed vitality, these works make apparent a property of infrastructure that Lauren Berlant described as, “the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure.”² In Diurnal, infrastructure assumes some of the vigor of what it’s supposed to sustain and constrict.

1. Many thanks to Amanda Gluibizzi for reminding me of this work by Gordon Matta-Clark.
2. Lauren Berlant, “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (2016), p. 394.