Installation view, elegy for left hand alone (2015)
Eric Zimmerman
Elegy for Left Hand Alone
Art Palace, Houston, TX [link]
Unequal partners despite symmetry, Zimmerman offers the neglected left hand as a sympathetic narrator. Speaking in rare fragmented imagery –an ancient hand tool, Houdini magic tricks, plunder mined from the Voyager Golden Record, or a Werner Herzog screenshot– the selection is an eclectic imbalance, muted icons with remote poetic value. However, the deftness of the paintings belies a dexterity bordering on photographic, the hand over-compensating to remove touch from sight: a hand in absentia. Though manifest in sculpture, an impotent amputated clasping, more compelling are the Beuys basalt replicas*: a paper-thin pretense of heft, an embodied grasp at gravitas.
~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Art Palace and the artist.
X-ray of Left Hand (Voyager Interstellar Record Image #99), 2014. Ink on paper. 22 x 30 inches.
Albino Crocodile (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), 2014. Ink on paper. 22 x 30 inches.
Scraper (Aurignacian, 45,000 and 35,000 BP), 2014. Ink on paper. 7 x 9 inches.
Goo, 2014. Ink on paper. 30 x 22 inches.
Mysterious Matches, Floating Ball, 2014. Graphite on paper. 15 x 24 inches.
Aerogel (1931), 2014. Ink on paper. 30 x 22 inches.
