NYAB Event - Joseph Montgomery “Doll Index”

Joseph Montgomery “Doll Index”

Peter Blum Gallery

This event has ended.

Doll Index is a new body of work representing Joseph Montgomery’s continuing exploration of the shim - a tapered wedge of material typically used to fill gaps or spaces between objects to influence their levelness. The exhibition includes monumental wall pieces in lacquered MDF, compositions of cardboard sprayed with plaster, and layered assemblages. Recently, Montgomery has rearranged the repeated shim form into the representation of a figure.

Accompanying the exhibition, the website dollindex.com uses JavaScript to generate all possible doll combinations when given an operator-specified number of shim units as the probability framework for head, shoulder, hip, and calf sizes. Printed wallpaper that covers the east wall of the gallery exhibits 140 of these vectored doll images. Doll Index includes two animations of dolls on flat screen monitors. These videos show the doll perpetually repeating two labors including walking and birthing. The infinite repetitiousness of the doll anthropomorphizes Joseph Montgomery’s questions about authorship and originality in the labors of image proliferation.

Difference, repetition, and representation inform Montgomery’s image making labors and build the architecture of this exhibition. This framework is supported by the artist’s system of titling each work as “Image” followed by the sequential number at which he completes the object—reinforcing not only the assembly of disparate fragments into compositions but also the discord between the materiality of paintings and the immateriality of their dissemination.