Village Voice
The past resides in the present; all the stuff left is ever-piling-on to create a spectral atmosphere of the visible and invisible, leaving the present to exert itself as a negative elsewhere. At “Residual Historical Haunting,” an eight-artist show organized by independent curators Roxana Fabius and Humberto Moro, this latent material surfaces as subject rather than backdrop. From the outset, the exhibition emits a muted, clinical vibe that’s more laboratory than white cube. At the center, Jorge De La Garza’s Untitled (Everything that is dead quivers) — a tableau of black-and-white page fragments, semiprecious stones, and other inscrutable objects — resembles a worktable for vague geologic sorcery. Among the catalogue of remnants and revisions on the surrounding walls are Dana Levy’s Literature of Storms, Chapter 2, which projects disturbances onto eerie vintage photographs; a series of paintings by Melanie Smith, in which the figures appear forlornly unfinished; Gonzalo Lebrija’s mellowly affected large-format, creased-paper works; and a souvenir-like nature hologram by Matthew Schreiber, which provides a lone flicker of saturated color in the room.
