Altmann inverted his work. What were once beams barnacled in the happy modern-trash detritus - like a more highly magnetized Rachel Harrison, or a contemporary Barres de bois - have been in this exhibition turned inside-out into spherical holes of diorama-like insides, magnetar earths erupting, revealing a cybernetic brain theatre; the gallery itself turned inside out, internal, as if the small spheres contained the negative air of the white gallery space, the clippings on the tarp reiterating the outside/inside mix-up, like is the air in your stomach technically outside of you?
It’s hard not mention Mike Kelley’s Silver Ball, or Altmann’s contemporary, Nicolas Ceccaldi’s toy gun surveillance, and his own past objects but this exhibition runs with those, fueled by the drug of real heavy installionism.
The press release’s assemblage surrealism amplifies the theatricality of the whole thing to levels above reason, a little too indulgent, doing little to parse the actual small strangeness that exists, and instead bludgeoning it with lacking language. We get it dude, cybernetic weenies from venus.
