Brent Green’s Gravity Was Everywhere Closes Tomorrow at Andrew Edlin Gallery

POST BY PADDY JOHNSON

A scene from “Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then.” Image via: NYTimes.

Tomorrow is the last chance to see Brent Green’s brilliant exhibition Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. I wrote a press release for this work so I haven’t been able to write about it, a decision I’m now regretting given the dearth of response from New York’s art press. In my estimation, Green is one of the more talented and consistent video and installation artists to be showcased in Chelsea, so it’s disappointing to see so many art critics pass by this show.

Notably the film community has not. New York Times film critic Rachel Saltz gave his same titled movie a “critics pick” when his feature length film screened at IFC in May. Saltz described the movie as radiating “an oddball homemade charm”, a different reaction than my own review for his show at Bellwether three years ago at The Reeler, which described the aesthetic of his work as familiar.  “Yet the success of this exhibition does not lie in the reinvention of the wheel,” I wrote, “but rather that Green never confuses the maudlin with the poetic or inconsistency with falseness.”

The artist’s exhibition, Gravity is Everywhere, holds these same characteristics. Telling a true story of Leonard Wood, a hardware store owner in Kentucky, the film recounts the man’s endless additions to a house he conceived of as a healing machine for his ailing wife. She had terminal cancer. Green’s full-scale interpretation of the house, plus a series of video projections and sculptures, is on display at Andrew Edlin. I highly recommend it.