Lewis Stein

"The man-made world is constructed through human interaction, even the streets and sidewalks. But we take it for granted. This work is about not taking it for granted."

—Lewis Stein, Mousse, 2017

Lewis Stein (b. 1945; d. 2022) was a conceptually oriented artist active across various mediums. After studying at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, from 1968 Stein lived and worked in New York City. This exhibition focuses on two of Stein's most significant bodies of work. A 1984-85 photographic series that takes surveillance cameras as their subject, and readymade objects from the 1970s. Both series explore systems of control and were shown in significant exhibitions, such as a 1985 show of Surveillance photographs at Postmasters Gallery, and a 1979 presentation of a standard door unit at Artist's Space.

Stein's billy club, dating from 1968, evokes the two primary registers at which his works operate. On the one hand, they engage with systems of power. The billy club being a familiar tool of the carceral state. On the other hand, Stein draws out the element of humor inherent in people's hubristic desire to control their environment. When Stein hangs a billy club from a nail, he presents it as much as an elegant sculpture as a brutal device waiting to be handled.

Stein turned to photography starting in the late 1970s. He was interested in extending his investigation of systems of control by documenting elements of his surroundings with the same balance of criticality and humor. An apogee of this exploration is his Surveillance series, five of which are on view here. For these works Stein used high speed film to photograph surveillance cameras around New York City, embracing the grainy effect generated by this process. This confrontation and interface between one mechanized lens and another captures the ominous ubiquity of constant surveillance which has only proliferated and become ever more insidious in the present moment. Yet in making these cameras the quirky subjects of large scale photographs, taken frontally, blown up and blurry, the cameras are defanged. With the distance of time they evoke eccentric robots.

The present exhibition provides a rare opportunity to assess the systems that quietly condition our daily lives from a prescient and still timely commentator.

—Alex Bacon