PAST 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.