Sept 16 – Nov 11, 2000 curated by Josee Bienvenu

*catalog available

123 Watts is pleased to present microwave, two the second of an exhibition in three parts inaugurated in September 1999 with microwave, one. microwave, two will open September 16 and will be on view through November 11, 2000.

Last year, microwave, one took place at the threshold of blindness - minimal signals, almost invisible rhythms and patterns, displacements of imperceptible scale occurred in a quasi-monochromatic context. The works stood at the borderline between drawing, knitting and writing. Two wall installations and an aluminum roll anticipated the intention to abandon the two-dimension without moving away from the world of drawing. microwave, one was a ‘stop sign’ imposing deceleration, prescribing short-sightedness as the best answer to globalization.

microwave, two introduces new norms of traffic. It reduces the scale again by incorporating vacuity as a new communication protocol. The exhibition presents a circulation of containers without contents, works that carry the simultaneous hope and failure of communication.

Stephen Sollins - Empty plastic pouches on the floor, marked with insignificant barcodes as a backward homage to monumentality and skeletal cut outs of the New York Times, laminated in plastic.

Wes Mills - Scenarios that are pre-articulated language give the impulse to communicate. Gray matter, the ante chamber to the word, generates signals - an alphabet of tenuous sensations

Gary Gissler - Infinitesimal words, graphite smudges and scratches on pristine white panels indicate laundry lists of manias, disjointed chains of thoughts – things barely heard or said, almost impossible to read and loaded with multiple meanings.

Elena del Rivero - Text-free letters, scenarios of paper and thread - in Unfinished Letter-composed of 130 units- and in Letter to the Mother.

Julianne Swartz - Three-dimensional orchestrations in fiber-optics that do not transmit any codes. A light installation, with very intricate trajectory of wires, results in a tiny light dot projected on the wall.

Diana Cooper - Machines that weave information, models of the mind at play: cell-conduit-handmade-machines, fusing painting, installation, architecture and collage these hybrid structures include plastic tubes, pipe-cleaners, pompoms in plastic pockets.

Kelly Kasczynski - Links of pins soldered together: sophisticated shadow networks unfolding on the wall.

Daniel Zeller - Black red and blue inks, sporadic zones of color, where the propelling logic is game-like and obsessively proliferative. The drawings focus on the dysfunction and degradation of decorative patterns.

Marti Cormand - Multitask machines: predetermined and restrained color codes: red–blue-green-identify multiple options – continuous merging and diverging lines of flights look like a short-circuited GPS tracking system.

Newspaper, plastic bags, felt-tip-pens, ballpoint pens, cardboard, thread, pins, wires: the materials used disclose an increasing admiration for the evanescent, as obsolescence is uniformly accelerated. Nobody feels nostalgic about an old mouse. A fiber optic cable carries 256 signals although we still can’t think in stereo. The exhibition offers a pause in downloading, a generous distribution of paragraphs and periods, a release from our immersion in the hypertext. downloading, a generous distribution of paragraphs and periods, a release from our immersion in the hypertext.