Privacy Policy. Please visit My Account to verify and manage your account. An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link. Sam Lewitt is a young artist in a hurry. He was barely out of his twenties when he scored the Whitney Biennial, and right now he is filling both outlets of the Miguel Abreu Gallery — the modest space on Orchard Street and the immodest one on Eldridge.
The two, very different presentations comprise his fourth solo at Abreu and his first in New York since the Biennial. The installation consisted of rectangular plastic tarps covered in ferromagnetic liquid, with magnets to hold particulates in place and electric fans to disperse them.
The more convincing, or at least the more readily graspable, of the two parts is found on Orchard Street, where Lewitt is presenting a series of four wall-mounted sculptures called Stored Value Field Separators , which were made in and , and two etchings from this year that also come from a series, Weak Local Lineaments.
The sculptures, three vertical and one horizontal, are made out of debit and credit cards sandwiched between surplus hard drive magnets, some of which are covered in translucent or black thermal plastic. The gleaming stainless steel elements screwed to the wall in a thin, solid line suggest spindly vertebrae the information centers of living machines or spindly cellphone towers the nuclei of 21 st -century interconnectivity.
These complications enrich and enliven the experience of looking at the sculptures, moving them past their conceptual base into arenas of imaginative play. This section left me perplexed and more than a little troubled, which is perhaps a good thing.
