Michael Zelehoski: Dimensionality

TANG Art Foundation is proud to announce the opening of “Michael Zelehoski: Dimensionality” on August 7, 2021. This show features a collection of works by the New York-based artist Michael Zelehoski. The series observed a visual process by deconstructing the character of mundane objects, using time-worn material that manifests and reassemble them in pictorial space seamlessly.

“When we interact with each other, there are some imperative to transform the material, or to channel it… into some other dimensionality, in my case, literal dimensionality.” — Michael Zelehoski

Organic material is an element that Michael Zelehoski interacted with in his work. Wood, a material that usually being used in making daily objects, such as furniture, construction, barricades, boxes, and crates. It carried the function and obligation that society applies; the character of the wood is instantly aware when it is seeing. Zelehoski’s work is an attempt to re-structure the character by observation. By channeling a context where the re-purposing can be seen:

“What if the reality that we think is not really what we think?”

The tangible changes of the virtual world were abandoned by society with repetitively applying definitions. The narrow conscious is constantly looping and cycling. In order to perceive the world, our eyes must navigate an increasingly crowded visual field with ever-changing depth and perspective. To distill a single object, to really see it for what it is, a surprisingly daunting proposition.

Objects are manifest. They don’t have to mean anything. Still, there are silent narratives at play and inevitably, through subjective associations. As old contexts of objects are obliterated, the beauty of their objecthood is highlighted, giving them a new order and coherence. Like Donald Judd and other artists associated with Minimalism, Zelehoski activates the relationship between object and space on an aesthetic level. But paradoxically, he is depriving objects of their spatial autonomy and physical integrity.

He avoids the standardized production commonly associated with Minimalism, a glance of a more intuitive process that derives organic stories from inorganic industrial materials. Zelehoski established a connection into the physical world, where consciousness is aware.