Aleph Contemporary – Laurence Noga: Poetics of Obsolescence

Slivers of forms trimmed to leave arcs and floating discs. Fat blocks and terse diagonals. A triangle, red or black, juts out from the construction, breaking a frame. Papered segments, painted segments. An unpainted wooden rod.

Embedded amongst the profusion of shapes are reminders of abandoned utility – a steel handle, a metal disc, a used ticket, part of a rusty tool, a faceless LP, an old washer. Nameless, obsolete utility. Bits of plastic and metal that, now stripped of function and context, lace the landscapes of geometry with rootless nostalgia.

These found signs without provenance function as humble, anachronic portals to other times. Collected from the artist’s father’s garage, they are fragmented mementos revealing the constructions as stratigraphic layerings of time. Vestiges of things that may once have moved but are now arrested, of anonymous processes and operative systems no longer in use, they reveal the obsolete as registration of the cessation of time’s continuity. Assemblage is activated as the debris of outdated signs, and the stratification of material layerings that embed time in the hybrid object.