Behind Giovanni Anselmo’s brilliant stone sandwich of live wires and Sarah Ortmeyer’s installation of marble chessboards with ostrich, mallard, quail, obsidian and avocado-colored emu eggs, which show how and how not to do a literal riff on chance, gambling, probability and the mysteries of life, respectively, is a strangely mesmerizing video installation by Tabor Robak, A*. On 11 flat screens of varying sizes hung together in a vertically and horizontally symmetrical, Salvador-Dalí-style explosion, a series of painstakingly computer-generated landscapes pop into dewy, wavering being before being reduced to backgrounds for games like Arkanoid, Marble Madness, or pachinko. Synthetic barnyard animals seen from above fall suddenly down a well, a Frankenstein’s monster looms hugely above bubbling mud puddles, pine trees wave in the snow, googly-eyed aliens crowd together, a robot demon waves his tail in front of scenes of Martian decay, a ball flies purposefully around the screens pretending to bounce, and American flag marbles cast shadows on the background as if it were flat. John Miller’s Labyrinth I is a TV-shaped, acrylic on canvas semi-abstracted close-up, in trippy ’70s colors, of the set of The Price is Right, displayed with motion-sensitive crowd noise above a 60-foot-long patchwork of carpet remnants by Cayetano Ferrer, Remnant Recomposition. In the gallery’s basement plays Ericka Beckman’s 1983 video You the Better, a semi-fond satire of masculine competition and the logic of capitalism that pictures consciousness as an absurd, endless, unwinnable basketball game played against oneself, complete with old-fashioned lace-up football pants, red and white caps, not-quite-smiley faces, a capella chanting, and a whip-cracking cowboy Jesus.
