A work from “Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989” at the Studio Museum in Harlem. CreditRobert Wedemeyer
“I use systems in order to provoke the issues around representation,” the Los Angeles artist Charles Gaines has said. His early drawings, the focus of “Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, resemble math-based artworks by Sol LeWitt and other pioneering conceptualists.
But they have a subtle political consciousness, a self-awareness about the limitations of logic and rules in a messy, arbitrary world.
In “Faces,” Mr. Gaines translates the head shots of diverse people into numbered grids that seem to anticipate both the promise and the danger of facial-recognition software. In “Walnut Tree Orchard,” he applies a similar strategy to the landscape, with a dogged persistence that finally registers as absurd. And in “Motion: Trisha Brown Dance,” he teams up with Ms. Brown to remind us that strict, sequential documentation is no way to capture fluidity and movement.
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