Drew Dominick has done something extraordinary in Sandroni Rey’s project space. He has developed a situation where sound, images, and physical objects mix to create a moment of strange animation -- animation in the traditional, old world, sense of giving a soul to dead or lifeless things. Freud would call this moment the uncanny, though one must hesitate to use that most overused term in fear it might turn Dominick’s interesting project into a vocabulary word. Really the best explanation is that Dominick relies on an open list of fears and oddities that develop over the course of one’s life (whether it be snakes or walking into a dark room only lit by the white fuzz of a television screen) to guide the viewer loosely into irrational thoughts and desires mostly of their own making.

Watch what happens when you interact with Dominick’s room – how you move from a general uneasiness into moments of revelation – you may think that certain objects like hoses and wooden strips are snakes and you may think that actual snakes are just objects (don’t worry, they are just little garden snakes). The viewer literally invents their own interpretation of a space as the space itself affects them.

Dominick’s installation will remind you of many artists including Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Mike Kelly, and maybe even a little Larry Clark if you look hard enough in the right light. Although Nauman is probably the most obvious parallel, the work is not easily reducible to any of these precedents.

-Ed Schad

(All images: Drew Dominick, "Snake Box with Video", July 26-August 30, 2008, Installation View, courtesy Sandroni Rey)