NYAB Event - Ethan Greenbaum “Flats”

Ethan Greenbaum “Flats”

Kansas

This event has ended.

KANSAS presents Flats, Ethan Greenbaum’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Ethan Greenbaum uses a range of digital and sculptural processes to excavate and reframe the built environment. His multimedia works link digital representation, architectural construction, and increasingly, language. Flats features three bodies of work: vacuum formed photographs on transparent panels, 3D powder prints and a new series of digital photos on CNC routered Corian.

In his vacuum formed works, the artist focuses on the ground plane in urban environments. Greenbaum visualizes this surface as a skin dividing the world above from a network of infrastructure beneath. His imagery often isolates moments where this partitioning is revealed through abstract symbols like the marks delineating telephone wiring or the graphic mark-making that splits pedestrian and traffic lanes. In these latest pieces, the artist has printed photographs onto both sides of transparent panels, resulting in a dense layering of figure and ground that echoes his preoccupation with what lies above and below. The final work is embossed with a low-relief impression of ceiling tiles - topographical surfaces similarly used to mask the internal wiring and pipe work in many buildings.

For the exhibition, Greenbaum also expands on his recent series of low-relief 3D powder prints, increasing their scale and incorporating them within an architectural installation of vinyl wrapped wooden studs. The prints begin with dimensional scans of building materials like insulating foam, wood and ceiling tiles - often the same items used as molds in his vacuum forms. The scans are then wrapped or engraved with architectural imagery or logos recreated from building supply brands. This process results in works where language is literally embedded in form, modeling how branding penetrates material. Many of the prints also include inoperable electrical outlets and ventilation panels. These ports serve as functional hanging hardware as well as abstract signifiers for networks of unseen power below the exterior.

The artist’s newest series of photographs on carved Corian are pulled from the his archive of cell phone photos. The imagery is often of facades, like construction fences or removed signage, that can be experienced as both entry point and dead end. Using 3D modeling programs, Greenbaum converts the images into dimensional surfaces that are then chiseled into sheets of Corian using a computer controlled router. The same photograph that generated the relief is then transferred onto the surface using a flatbed printer. The final works are a product of this doubling, rich in uncanny misalignment between touch and sight. Their square format is another point of repetition, overlaying the Corian’s origin as a modular material sample with the square format of the cell phone’s viewfinder.

Ethan Greenbaum (b. Tom’s River NJ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Selected exhibition venues include Hauser and Wirth, New York; Marianne Boesky, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; KANSAS, New York; Derek Eller Gallery, New York; Circus Gallery, Los Angeles; Halsey McKay Gallery, New York; Steven Turner, Los Angeles; The Suburban, Chicago; Michael Jon, Miami; The Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; and Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City.