A meteorite with the same chemical make-up as the sun is flying through space. Eventually it crashes into the earth. It is picked up and brought to a factory where it is included in the manufacturing process, and melded into a common drinking fountain. Installed and plumbed at the Martos Gallery, we are invited to turn the knob and take a sip.

Jokes depend on logical non-sequiturs. Though there is a certain humor in this narrative of the meteorite, the sudden shift that occurs in Meteorite Fountain can be more accurately described as a perceptual non sequitur. At one moment we are contemplating something vast, and at the next we are engaged in the most down-to-earth activity. Have a drink from the fountain and contemplate the universe. Instead of a punch line, we are left to simmer in paradox; instead of climactic revelation we are suspended in melancholic longing.

This perceptual shift structures each of the works in Marc Ganzglass’s first solo exhibition in New York: part of a satellite used to study the origin of the universe is placed on a bench, allowing us to sit and roll it back and forth with our hand (Reaction Wheel, 2009); an analog for the creative process is found in a simple tandoor oven as we compare it’s two fires – open and closed (Islamabad, 2010); with a kind of farmer’s logic, blocks of brass alloy are re-purposed as doorknobs (Black Ingots, 2010); a lecture hall at the Niels Bohr Institute becomes the stage for simple camera effects (The Copenhagen Interpretation, 2009); an exceedingly flat aluminum table functions as a Euclidean space for comparison of technical and social objects (Important Aluminum, 2009); a furnace is stripped of it’s use value and turned into an image (Crucible, 2009); and posters for a geology museum point towards real human tragedy (Dødsønske, 2010).

There are certain concepts that continue to fascinate because of their very inaccessibility: the genesis of the universe, the quantum world, death. Yet, as historian Cyril Stanley Smith has pointed out “...however basic these ultimates may be, the scale of man lies in between: his own unique existence as a functioning organism and the phenomena reported by his senses depend in the main on neither atoms nor universes, but on middle-sized aggregates two or three hierarchical stages above the atom.”

– Daniel Lefcourt

Marc Ganzglass lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1999. Recent exhibitions include Dødsønske at Bastard, Oslo and The Listening Act at Walden Affairs, The Hague, Netherlands. His work will be included in the upcoming exhibition Elixers of Panacea at the Palais Bénédictine, Fécamp, France curated by Ami Barak. In September 2010 Marc will be artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation, Marfa Texas.