
Image: Postmasters Gallery | this one is smaller than this one
The whole of this one is smaller than this one, the new show in the Postmaster’s Gallery is confined to one table in an otherwise empty room, with white walls and a wooden floor and a single black pillar.
The table is white too, asymmetrical and many-legged, with raised bits and sunken spots and non-continuous surfaces. More than 70 pieces of work are spread across it, arranged in groupings, in lines, or just scattered. Created by 28 different artists, those collections of work have only one thing in common – they are all small. Hence the lowercase title.
Size aside, the pieces are all of different materials, different disciplines. Little gold cockroaches crawl over the edge of the table. A snake made of nylon and porcupine quills lies fatly across a gap in the table (“Cobra,” Monica Cook). Thirty-nine tiny bunk-beds out of a news-clip about a cult suicide make a small square, starkly empty (“In The Future the Past Will Be Different,” Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw).
There’s no aim at a coherent message to this curated show. Though every artist present is there by the invitation of Paulina Bebecka, the curator, the theme is the small size of each individual piece. Red lacquered fingernails with no hands might be the smallest things on the table. The largest, in some sense of the word, is Andrew Thomas Huang’s infinitely playing loop of video, the only subject a small render of a rotating abstract object.
this one is smaller than this one will be on display at the Postmasters Gallery at 54 Franklin Street, TriBeCa, through the 12th of March. When you stop by to see it, be sure to rub the disembodied bronze nose of Gregg Louis’ sculpture. He says it brings good luck.