20 Jul 2017

Gabriel Kuri: Afterthought is Never Binary

Sadie Coles HQ

Reviewed by William Corwin

Kuri fabricates a history of enumeration. He begins with the primeval and innate desire to count and arrange things - beans, shells, rocks. The process blossoms into regulating geometries - oversized punch cards and adjustable pricing signs. It culminates in pure mechanization, as a series of stainless steel dispensers of mass-produced objects like plastic straws and artificial representatives of value such as bank notes.

Kuri cross-fertilizes his objects with a refreshing openness, bedecking pastel-hued felt punch cards with mussels and vacuum-molded plastic sheets with kidney beans. Occasionally these homemade computers are overwhelmed with the substances they seek to quantify, as when handsome little boulder sits triumphantly on an over-sized supine price card, set face-down on the floor, or when a selection of beat-up wooden shims inhabit but refuse to conform to the neat troughs in which they are arranged on a stainless steel table.