Mike Asente, Nathan Bennett, Vincent Como, Elaine Kaufmann, Carrie Moyer, Sarah Oppenheimer, Yumi Janairo Roth, Seher Shah, Ruslan Trusewych, and Arnold von Wedemeyer.

Momenta Art is pleased to present Infinite Possibilities, a group show of environments, images or objects that promote or encourage transformations.

Mike Asente’s drawings are a manifestation of what could be described as a parlor game of the 21st century, “What would you blow up?” Asente’s repeated explosion image is hand scratched onto the surface of 1960’s advertisements printed surfaces. The physical act of removal of the actual image suggests a simultaneously additive and subtractive process of construction and destruction.

Acting as forgotten and inoperable Flavin sculptures, the ghost-like, minimalist-object, dangling, fluorescent fixtures of Nathan Bennett refer to the abandoned warehouses where the artist discovered them. Pure and derelict, these sculptures embody a false ready-made that has lost its functionality while confronting authenticity and form. A source photograph of the original warehouse in Ithaca, NY will be included with the sculpture.

Vincent Como explores the qualities of black from the standpoint of a color theorist, physicist, alchemist, and heavy metal connoisseur. The work takes given structures with an existent relationship to black and filters them into artworks, creating an expansive matrix of associations including Malevich and Reinhardt as aesthetic origins.

Elaine Kaufmann’s “International Design” is a series of exquisite pencil drawings that appropriate the layout and text of home design magazines. Images of provisional housing are substituted for images of luxury while retaining the text describing the amenities of wealth. This work contrasts media projections of the normalcy of luxury with the more common state of worldwide poverty.

Carrie Moyer’s paintings embrace an expanded lexicon of gesture, process and sign. Invented avatars — reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf, ceremonial instruments, human beings and animals — are evoked through the interplay of abstract shapes, flows of pure color, glitter and transparent veils of poured acrylic. Tongue-in-cheek investigations of Herstory and Judy Chicago’s “central core” imagery are playfully tweaked in large paintings that place abstracted fertility symbols within flat, poster-like landscapes worthy of a 1960s Supergraphic.

Much of Sarah Oppenheimer’s recent work has been an exploration of how the subject’s progression through architectural space approximates filmic experience, transforming the experience of moving through a space of display (museum, gallery) into a filmic progression, in which the body of the viewer becomes the body of the camera. The work is linked to early abstract film – particularly the film Rythmus 21 – by Hans Richter (1921). In the drawings included in Infinite Possibilities, the artist segmented the film into a discrete set of stills so as to further analyze the progression of frame alterations.

Yumi Janairo Roth will present casually placed work pallets incongruously inlaid with decorative mother of pearl designs. Mother-of-pearl, a process and material associated with traditional Filipino furniture, suggests that the pallets serve as symbolic surrogates for Filipinos who have migrated around the world. The work also functions to expand the aesthetic dialogue by exploring the interdependence of an historical artistic technique and its globalized mirror: the functional aesthetics of commerce.

Seher Shah’s Black Star Project is a portfolio of 25 prints that has evolved over the past two years. Each print is a study into the geometry of the cube and its multiple associations as both an architectural element, religious symbol, universal geometry and reductive massing. Using elements from ornamental art, animation, graffiti and architectural drawing, the studies use the power of transformation in symbolic meaning. Shah defines the Cube as the Black Star and represents ideas and connections of childhood memory where geometric forms and architectural spaces, part autobiographical, part mythology and part fairytale are woven together to create the visual narrative.

Ruslan Trusewych presents the phrase “and by you I mean me,” in laser cut acrylic letters, resting inconspicuously amid an accumulated structure of tetrahedrons constructed of gold-glitter, hot-melt glue-sticks. Conflations of value become a stable support for a shifting casual proposition as this work fulfills its contained mission. In another work, an informal collection of marks is torn out of a notebook and triangularly framed in a reflexive manner that echoes the drawing’s diagrammatic quality. Its formal elements, balanced, cancel each other out and leave an object that is not anything but nonetheless does what it says.

Arnold von Wedemeyer’s painstakingly produced video work On-Time Still Life I presents a vase of tulips withering, a slice of bread hardening, a monitor depicting rolling waves with a stock ticker screen crawl, and light moving across the entire tableaux. Three contradictory levels of time are shown at once in this 9:20 piece. It is a carefully manipulated, computer-controlled series of photographs shot over a period of two weeks at minute-and-a-half intervals. The imagery refers to the first stock market crash in history, “Tulipmania.”