Watermill Brooklyn Gallery is showing new work by Ralf Ziervogel, a fall 2008 Watermill Center artist-in-residence. Entitled MAWHISTLA, the piece is a multimedia installation about clichés of viewing.

Curated by Dmitry Komis

In a dark room, with a black floor arranged like ice floes lit only by black light, MAWHISTLA appears like a deranged laboratory. An arrangement of 32 drawings that presents a puzzling stream of letters (A+B+...Z) confounds the viewer and addresses language as a source of faith and superstition. Taking inspiration from ideas developed by logician Kurt Gödel, best known for his “incompleteness” theorems, Ziervogel presents an unfulfilled human-made pattern (stream of letters) to depict a system in the midst of perfunctory malfunction. By arranging the static forms as if codes in an axiomatic system, the installation creates inner-images which are then mirrored as if in a continuous proof destabilized by logic and reasoning.