Over twenty-five years ago, Michel Foucault argued that “our experience of the world is less of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”[1] His recognition of a need for new means to conceptualize psycho-spatial experience of information and imagery was prescient and describes quite accurately the ways in which we receive information today.

Through technology and globalization, the information systems that one must navigate have grown from a tangle of linear thoughts into something more fluid and less defined, a simultaneous outpouring of information rather than an ordered or progressive system of ideas. We can no longer process information without being aware of how we find it, and how it is transmitted and received. This allows for a more subjective approach to absorption, rooted as much in the individual’s internal method for receiving content as in the content itself.

Other Spaces, the first curatorial venture organized by Jayne Drost, and sponsored in part by (capsule), gathers paintings, photography, sculpture, video and installation works by seven New York-based independent artists. Each of these artists assert the formal and material qualities of their work to propose a spatial montage²—an expression of some internal or psychological experience encountered as a constructed network of references.

Palma Blank’s abstract paintings play with the optical perception of spatial relationships in the picture plane. The bright and contrasting colors used in her compositions create illusions of movement and complicate the viewer’s read of the two-dimensional canvas. The formal qualities of her line-based paintings refer to the striations and pattern often seen on a digital screen.

Leah Dixon’s paintings, which incorporate a collage of paper, canvas and synthetic materials in aggressively mismatched images and clashing colors, evoke the constant and aggressive onslaught of media, news images and information experienced in daily contemporary culture.

In the work of Sam Falls, the artist deploys large format photography, source material, and digital painting to blur the perception of where the actual ends and the image begins. His latest series of photographs entitled Re-Constructions incorporates a series of paper forms altered by light and shadow, the resulting images of which are in dialogue with both sculpture and traditional photography.

Left Coast, the collaborative group of artists and musicians Sarah *Kuhn, Lane LaColla and David Shull, with technical assistance by photographer and video artist Gautam Kansara, create video and installation works that draw upon a multitude of references from art and pop culture. This site-specific work on view Untitled (Freed/Feed), 2010 uses the act of charity or gifting to reflect upon the new-age narcissism inherent in a contemporary, image-conscious culture.

Daniel Turner’s minimal sculptures use highly evocative and often caustic materials, such as tar, iodine and vinyl in surprisingly delicate ways. In his sculptures and space interventions, the artist manipulates these materials to evoke an austere, almost ethereal calmness out of what may otherwise be used to create an oppressive, industrial atmosphere. April, 2010, the latest work in the series of tar, Camphophenique and vinyl paintings in what Turner has deemed the 5250 series (referring to the hospital code for being a threat to oneself or society) is on view in addition to a site-specific wall drawing made by repeating bodily gestures by the artist.

Drawing upon a network of references from art history, biology, and pop culture, Timothy Uriah Steele explores relationships of space, time and location in his paper relief paintings. Steele mixes a wide range of legible imagery with abstract elements in his compositions to create psychological apparitions of an (un)known space or time.

Using a cache of unambiguous objects in his sculptural practice, Kristof Wickman reframes the familiar through the use of humor and alienation. In his minimalist sculptures of culturally specific and yet unclassifiable forms, Wickman subtly manipulates what appears to be a “readymade.” By isolating a specific alteration, he undermines both the thing itself and the tired Duchampian process of straight re-presentation of everyday objects.

(capsule) is a concept trade event for the fashion industry, focusing on an international gathering of up and coming progressive designers. In conjunction with its inaugural event at 548 West 22nd Street, (capsule) has developed an initiative to support independent and emerging visual artists. The exhibition is free and open to the public Monday thru Friday from 11AM to 7PM.

¹ Foucault, Michel, “Des Espace Autres,” Continuité, October 1984

² Manovich, Lev, “The Archaeology of Windows and Spatial Montage,” self-published online, September 2002