Edwin Schlossberg: Once Upon A Time When Everyone Was Conscious

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Once Upon A Time When Everyone Was Conscious, its first solo exhibition of Edwin Schlossberg’s work. Edwin Schlossberg is an artist and poet whose art practice carries the written word into the realm of visual art. This exhibition showcases recent paintings and works on paper made during the pandemic. Created in the past two years, the body of work reflects on different forms of interdependency between human beings in this fraught time of political conflict and physical separation. The show is both a deep sounding of our collective state as shaped by the Trump-Covid era and a continuation of the artist’s sustained themes over many decades.

These elements are all in play throughout the Ethan Cohen Gallery exhibition, Once Upon A Time When Everyone Was Conscious. The title suggests a hypothetical time, perhaps illusory and prelapsarian, when consciousness prevailed (or not). A political implication might be intimated, of a time before the Trump era perhaps. It certainly drives home Schlossberg’s focus on consciousness itself. As usual with the written panels we struggle on the pivot of whether to look at or read the words. The eye goes back and forth, into the words’ meanings and out at their visuality. Which is the right perspective? Caught in the transverse, self-consciousness overtakes us, that is awareness of ourselves thinking. Panels with blacked out horizontal swaths suggest classified documents with censored sections or pure black-on-white abstraction. One such entitled With Proof Truth is, according to Schlossberg, about “what we had, what we want, what we lost—empirical truth”, no doubt also referring to the Trump era and all the official inquiries failing to arrive at certainty. And when we see the works that resemble traditional Chinese literati landscapes, mindful of Schlossberg’s erudition, we realize he might be quoting from the ‘floating landscape’ convention of China’s ancient artists who deliberately conjured the elusive and ineluctable. They prompted onlookers to realize that what they saw in the work came out of their own imagining.

Uncertainty as an existential state is a recurrent theme. Ever the experimentalist, Schlossberg often deploys his customized paint ingredients: sometimes using Scotchlite that incorporates reflecting glass beads, sometimes Japanese paint with tiny ground crystals of diamonds, rubies, semiprecious stones. And sometimes both, as he does in the show’s title work. The effect is to distort the diffusion of light through the material, toying with our sense of perspective, evanescing and changing depth as we move from side to side. In the Diaries series, the words are clearly written but the sentences meander so diffusely that we float weightless through the multiple possible meanings. The panel, As You Mean Something, offers a kind of calligraphic trompe l’oeil where the written letters never become fully discernible whatever the angle or distance the eye assays. The calligraphy constantly sinks or fails to quite emerge, a lost language or one struggling to articulate. “There’s an overall message about interdependence” the artist has said about the show. Here, we begin to apprehend his meaning. If we do not agree on shared parameters, in our values, our aesthetics or even our perceptual criteria, there can be no truth and even less understanding. As Schlossberg’s physicist side might deem it: We must forever replicate the first steps of creation, imposing order or filtering meaning out of chaos, forever caught in the first moments of the Big Bang where the infinite expansion of possibilities can arc either towards coherence or eternal disarray.

Walk-through and conversation 
Join us for the curatorial walk-through of this exhibition. The artist, Edwin Schlossberg, and the gallerist, Ethan Cohen, will have a fascinating conversation about this impressive solo exhibition. This event will take place on Wednesday, November 10th, at Ethan Cohen Gallery in Chelsea, New York, from 6 to 8pm.

Schedule a visit.