“Permutation” at Two Rams Gallery, New York

The artists in Permutations explore the infinite potentials that exist within defined systems. By allowing free will and chance to play a hand within what is pre-ordained, the works in Permutation mimic the circuitous relationship between destiny and choice.
Alexis Dahan’s in-situ installation started with Blue Puddles, a public intervention Dahan did on may 25th, 2014. On a morning stroll in downtown New York, he dropped ultramarine dry pigments into the water puddles that had formed over the rainy night. Each of the temporary bright blue shapes that resulted were photographed an their location pinpointed on a map. For Permutations, Dahan has reproduced his itinerary on the gallery walls to create a constellation of street corners. Each point is linked to either a charcoal drawing of the corresponding shape of the sky viewed from the sidewalk, or a drawing made from carbon transferred footprints of passerby, or a photographic account of the Blue Puddle intervention.

Sam Fryer is an abstract painter. For the artist, paintings are breeding grounds for ideas. “It is essential that I cannot know what will come of an idea for a painting until I actually make the painting. Painting, for me, is active thinking. It is a learning experience that matures with each canvas. I am convinced that thought and feeling exist before the concepts, words and other conventional forms of expression we use to communicate them.”

Juliet Jacobson focuses on how creases in paper produce a seemingly infinite variation. Seriality imparts identity within a discrete group and yields an affinity of part to whole. A sheet of paper might have an ephemeral life as refuse or recycling, but may also carry ideas across centuries thereby collapsing time and space. These drawings aim to capture the tension between prosaic experience and broader ideological or allegorical issues.

Sameer Reddy contributes a drawing converted digitally to lightbox. Dawn depicts a window looking onto a sunrise, which is simultaneously becoming a sunset. This construction of time presents an intersection of different
dimensions. Dawn is conceptually rooted in the wave-particle concept of quantum physics, which suggests that the seemingly static and discrete elements are engaged in a movement that can allow them to merge. Photo Elise Gallant

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