The lab and the riff: Diverse processes come together in Synaesthesia

While the term synaesthesia refers to cross-sensory experience, in the exhibition Synaesthesia what comes across even more strongly is the power of accretion. Both Nick Bloomberg and Oliver Lewis allude to stuff piling up — Bloomberg to time and events, Lewis to the effluvia of consumer culture. Bloomberg celebrates it; Lewis tries to rein it in.

Synaesthesia provides a rewarding opportunity to see two talented artists early in their careers as they’re developing their respective aesthetics and working out a few kinks.

Oliver Lewis started off as premed student. He threw it all off to become a self-taught artist, but his love of scientific process remains. His large works (about 40 inches x 30 inches) involve staged photos that he manipulates in Photoshop and silkscreens onto wood panels, which he then coats with chemicals and chars to reveal the final monochromatic image. If everything goes right, the result is an impressive meditation on the too-muchness of contemporary culture, with a little memento mori thrown in. If it doesn’t, the piece can literally go up in flames.

These pieces function like windows onto a strange world that Lewis has created, although I did find that the glossy frames and prominent signature detracted a bit from this otherworldliness. (But he picks up some extra credit for his cool labels.)

Nick Bloomberg’s work is deeply influenced by music, particularly jazz. Much of the work here is based on etchings that he digitally reproduces on canvas and then paints back into. They are exuberant, filled with jittery forms and colors.

Bloomberg is drawn to what happens in interstices, how various art media and forms can interact not just during the process of making art, but after a work is completed. He also ponders what it means to finish a work or how one even determines when a work is finished. This is evident in “Sphinx,” perhaps his most accomplished piece here, which derives a lot of its energy from the interplay of precise lines and frenetic washes of color.

Bloomberg’s passion for bringing diverse elements together can be seen not only in his individual works but in the way they’re exhibited. In this case though, I think he would have been better served by a more spare, cohesive installation; in particular, I found the inclusion of a single wood piece distracting, especially in such a compact space.

So what about the title of the exhibition? “Making visual art that is process-oriented and then bringing in music and poetry — the art then becomes what happens between all these individual efforts,” Bloomberg told me at the Sept. 3 opening. “That is a fascinating thing to work with — where the larger art piece is the conversation and the development within the community.” This experience is what he and Lewis are going for on Sept. 17: the exhibition will open at 6 p.m. and an event featuring live poetry by Adeola Fearon and music by Ultimate Optimist, Blossoms and Many Moons begins at 8:30 p.m.

— Barbara Schreiber

Synaesthesia at Grinfactor, The Arthouse, 3103 Cullman Ave., NoDa.

This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2010.