The Brooklyn Rail

In Roland Barthes’s essay “Paris Not Flooded,” Barthes describes the ways that the waters of the flood disrupted the covert ideologies of the city, almost as a form of magic. “The flood not only seized upon and displaced certain objects, it overwhelmed the coenesthesia of landscape, the ancestral organization of horizons: habitual lines of the survey map, curtains of trees, rows of houses, roads, the riverbed itself, and that angular stability which so carefully prepares the forms of property, all this was blurred…detaching [us] from reason, from a utensility of sites.” Barthes goes on to say that the flood’s destruction of these barriers within the city generated a kind of euphoria, a childlike joy as borders were undone. What physical politics are exposed when we unsettle the lines of borders and boundaries? Kaitlin Pomerantz and Lucia Thomé’s curation of Barrier at ArtYard is its own kind of flood. It stylizes and reinterprets the material syntax of architecture that closes off access—the materials and forms that reinforce borders and boundaries—to express its language and visualize a choreography of unimpeded movement that serves as a kind of resistance.

On the wall is a quote by Angela Davis claiming that “walls turned sideways are bridges.” However, the work in the exhibition steps back from overtly asserting such a positive sentiment. Instead, the work collectively expresses a desire to challenge what these barriers literally and psychically signify, while also ensuring that what they represent is impossible to forget. It is the act of looking at such barriers that opens up new possibilities, and exhibitions can elicit an embodied knowledge that extends past conventional research to materialize histories that are subjugated and thus exist below the surface of discourse. Here, curation is an aesthetic operation that takes the forms of gateways, dividers, and fences to make them over into archives and histories, opening up new epistemologies of movement, resistance, and awareness.

The artists included in this exhibition are invested in practices that pull new forms of research into visibility and point to more extensive archives, or what James Voorhies might describe as adjacent forms of “postsensual aesthetics.” Discrete objects often imply a larger array around them, arranged as poems of architecture or fragments of larger urban plans. One critical method here is the simulation of architectural forms, a tactic that allows a viewer to better see the outline of what they impose upon us through their difference. For example, Ghida Dalloul’s installation Rolling Paradox (2024) is a hanging pulldown gate made of plexiglass, based on the security structures of businesses in Beirut. It is the first work you encounter upon entering the show, surrounded by works from her “scRoll” series, freestanding photographic worlds printed on rolled-up translucent material. They stand vertically like cylinders of landscape, barely visible, their printed images subservient to the strong presence of color. Kristen Neville Taylor’s free-standing piece Spectral Device (2024) is its own kind of utterance nearby, a new glass structure that faintly echoes a sandwich board or small monument. A glass insect on the surface prompts us to ask what constitutes a memory: how do we know something without the incidental events that make up that knowledge? Glass, both a deceptive material and a modernist architectural trope, here loosens the rigid forms of architecture into a space of poetics.

There are also more direct approaches. David L. Johnson’s Adverse Possessions (2022–ongoing) is an incredible conceptual sculpture made of removed property plaques from around the city of New York. Normally used to delineate boundaries so that unhoused people can be kept off the premises, here they are repossessed by the artist. It is a physical reconfiguring of research, a way of seeing the city according to the imperceptible forces that give out certain rights to certain populations. But it is also a form of memory and recovery. Zach Ozma similarly displays what he has recovered from the river bed of Darby Creek in Pennsylvania: broken ceramics, the excess of colonialism that can’t be reduced to data, the material remnant of its consequence. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Naomieh Jovin hangs the gate of the house her father was building before he died. It could be a relic of what is unfulfilled and unsettled at the edges of time, but also, hopefully, an acknowledgement that our life is carried on into materials in some way. There is something noble to the idea that all of our efforts that accumulate within what we work on, the portraits that are made of our aspirations and our projects.

With each rephrasing of the barrier, the space between reality and artifice reveals strategy. In Dieter Mersch’s Epistemologies of Aesthetics, he outlines an aesthetics that exists through its ability to visualize research in new ways. Jason Voorhies’s recent book Postsensual Aesthetics expands upon this idea: art and aesthetics now are a means of connecting to the archive in a more embodied way. Curation is another way of introducing poetic archives that account for what data cannot encompass. While much of the work in Barrier could fall into this category, there are some more sensualist exceptions. Sandra SK Amoabeng’s installation A Calabash Sprout (2024) is made entirely of pigmented mud, turning the barrier into a lyrical alternative timeline of itself. While attractive, it also throws into sharper relief the ways that barriers are currently used. It is as much a condemnation as it is a demonstration of visual beauty.