UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Enclosure Lateral Movement
Bill Abdale
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Opening Reception:
Artist:
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Enclosure Lateral Movement
Bill Abdale
Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York presents an exhibition of works by artist Bill Abdale. On view from September 11 – October 30, 2024, Enclosure Lateral Movement comprises works that engage with urban settings in unexpected ways through a blend of printmaking, photography, and installation. An opening reception will be held on September 11 from 6 – 8pm at 128 Baxter St. in New York.
Set in familiar but unidentified locations, Abdale’s works evoke the anonymity of the city. Rather than documenting sites known for their historic significance or inherent beauty, the artist renders mundane everyday spaces newly disorienting through deliberate glitches, discoloration, gaps and cropping.
The exhibition derives its title from the screen printed work Enclosure Lateral Movement (2024), which features an elongated image of a fenced-off lot. Intentional errors in the digital stitching of the panoramic photograph disrupt the regularity of the chain-link fencing. This causes the viewer to waver between perceiving it as a consistent pattern and recognizing its distorted state. The piece, measuring over eleven feet wide, is divided into sections and dispersed throughout the gallery, preventing it from being seen in its entirety at once.
Similarly, the installation Deselection Index (2024) is a single work divided into excerpted compositions with irregular intervals of space between them. It features a series of thin strips of screen printed plywood mounted vertically on the wall. These strips combine large areas of flat color with images of office windows and other architectural surfaces. The resulting compositions offer variations on a theme, but resist unification into a whole. While the printed surface is emphatically flat, traces of color on the sides of the plywood reveal the methodical, layered process of building up the imagery. Additionally, the plywood is fastened to hover slightly off the wall, emphasizing its three-dimensional presence.
Though based on photographic source material, Abdale’s works seek a different approach to printed objects, as well as new modes of displaying them. By manipulating the installation strategies and spatial relations between the pieces, the artist encourages a slowed-down, decentralized reading of the work. This approach connects the sensory experience of viewing the exhibition to the immediate presence of a place.
Bill Abdale is an artist based in New York. He has participated in numerous workshops and residencies, including The Lower East Side Printshop (New York), SOMA (Mexico City), and Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico). In the early 2010s he was a partner and co-curator at the artist-run Heliopolis Project Space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He received an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY and a BFA from Purchase College, SUNY.