The Brooklyn Rail

Twin Study, David Muenzer’s recent solo show at Soldes gallery in Los Angeles, started as an online search. The artist was missing his deceased grandmother so much he Googled her. The archive he discovered offered a view he’d never had of his grandparents and their Bengali heritage—a world he knew from the inside was now presented to him from the outside. The nature of this view, embodied by refraction, is what the artist explores in his drawings, sculptures, and found objects.

In a glass vitrine on the ground floor we first encounter one of an extensive series of Muenzer’s monotone, brick-red drawings. These drawings relish in finely scaled hatch work, capturing incidental details with democratizing precision. The pencil strokes come laced with inherited aesthetic value, owing to both the classical studies of artists such as Ingres and Daumier, as well as the preparatory drawings for graphic novels and comics. The aesthetic is as delectable as it is dismissible in a contemporary art context, enhancing the utilitarian nature of the drawings—they do conceptual work. Seen from an aerial view, the drawing depicts four figures at a carefully set table, squeezed into a room with desks, houseplants, books, and portraits.

The title of the drawing, A Mild Stimulating Beverage (2023), seems to suggest we are free to move on and treat it as a kind of amuse bouche. But this isn’t possible owing to the peculiar physiognomy of the figures. Large globe-shaped heads sprout from their shoulders, circumscribed with blank latitudinal and longitudinal lines and incidentally applied faces. In the press release, Jeffrey Stuker describes these globes—a feature of the entire series—as marking “the moment at which the individual subject must appear as a totally inscribed externality, a dimensional map of a distant territory of which he serves as a representative example.” Embodying the alienating effects of the externalized gaze in figural form, the gestures’ power is enhanced by being embedded here in something as common as a table scene.

Upstairs in the main gallery, a second of these drawings, Ann Arbor Wedding (2020), features a grouping of pensive male figures in tweed suits and polished leather shoes donning ritualistic hats atop their globe heads. The central figure of this tableau is seated unexpectedly in an Eames wireframe chair, the sibling of which rests on the floor of the gallery beneath it. Unlike the original version depicted in the drawing, which smacks of both intellectual and cultural acuity, the found knockoff version has a degraded feel that is enhanced by a thin coat of gold spray paint. Welded into the backrest of this chair is a series of bars and cubes and spheres forming an abstract composition not out of sync with the chair’s original era of design, also the era of early software modeling language. Bringing to mind networks of different types, Bilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage (2024), refers to a kinship diagram schematizing a pattern of wedded cousins that stabilizes power among two prominent families in a closed society.

Elsewhere in the gallery we encounter a sizable formation of shimmering, gold husks mounted to the gallery wall across from a series of windows whose daylight sets the array aflame. These wall-hugging sculptures are made by pressing pulped Mulberry paper into large hand-formed plaster molds. Perhaps a purposeful confounding of “cast” and “caste,” the title of this piece Biyer Goyna (Anwar Dil Places a Wedding Ring on the Finger of His Wife Afia 1961) (2024), implicates the wedding jewelry presented to the bride as part of a traditional Muslim ceremony. More image than object, the jewelry is optimized for the most spectacular visual experience. Stored away after the ceremony concludes, the weightless baubles have commemorative value only. In Muenzer's gold-leafed, handmade kozo-pulp paper-construction, the action of the title is absent, where one expects the figures to be, there is only gallery wall. In this form it is the displacement of ancestry that is being modeled, synonymous perhaps with making art under the troubled weight of a history fraught with omissions that proliferate based on media representations.

Twin Study (2024), the work that gives the exhibition its title, is a wall work that depicts two articles taken from the Ann Arbor news in the early sixties. Multiplied and locked in an infinite regression, this compact formation is UV-printed in an ultra-thin layer of ink on a sheet of galvanized steel. With the yellowed paper of the clippings and their stuttering mandala-like geometry, the piece presents itself as a kind of primitivist bulletin board or scrapbook, but in the end rhymes more with screens and circuit boards.

The first of the intertwined articles is a human-interest story describing the marriage ceremony of Muenzer’s maternal grandparents, which is the core of his found archive. The second article is about a houseful of grandchildren consisting of three sets of twin boys from a single set of parents. I was surprised to find one of the subjects of the article was the artist’s namesake, uncannily reintroducing the maker of the exhibition as a twinned child in a puff piece. The diagram these articles inscribe seems to point to the fractured quality of what inheritance and heredity can provide. The twinning implies this potential multiplicity, prismatized by the refraction of transportable elements of the past, with its inherent omissions and duplications.

If Muenzer's work is proceeding in something resembling chapters, this one appears to be the most outwardly autobiographical. However, if one follows the lead of the artist’s earlier works—a virtual scattering of morphemes—we are perhaps ill advised to expect we’ll encounter anything overly legible or coherent in terms of an articulated thesis. And should we really be expecting one anyway? If anything, the evolution of media (and politics and culture) tells us that the center has not held, content floats free, and the glue that currently combines disparate entities is increasingly nothing other than culture-less aggregators and subject-less containers. In the face of this, what does it mean to confront one’s heredity from the outside? And is the work currently on view a confrontation of heredity, an exploded version of its gap-ridden techno-biological matrix, or an inventory of its state, performing the alienation that is inherent to the system? A blank sphere, or even a spinning disk, offers no direction on its own.