Michele Abeles

The opposite of speed is silence. The image is mute and a little mercurial. Visit the optometrist once every five years, then every four years, then every two. If I can’t stick the swab in the canal, how am I supposed to clean my goddamned ears?

Canal 47 is proud to present Turbo, a new selection of photographs made between 2020 and 2024 by artist Michele Abeles. Objects visible in the mirror are hotter than they appear.

If you want to do your own research, begin with the ecstasy of being understood. Narcissus would have lived to a right ripe age if he hadn’t recognized himself. Echo wasted away to a voice, meanwhile, which is not the same as reverb. I read The Metamorphoses on a car trip across the country before all hell broke loose. On the Road is just typing, not vision, Truman Capote said, or so one version of the story goes.

The former point guard retains a quick first step thanks to immaculate pronation. The angelic perfection of light on a four-inch wrench is its own annunciation. Crows can use all kinds of tools but not language, alas. Parrots, it is believed, feel compelled to speak to us out of peer pressure. Their need to be part of the flock is deeply felt, which is the same word we use for sheep.

There is a way in which a parrot is like a bobsled, would you like to learn more?

The automobile in the golden photo is missspelllleddddd X Infiniti. The vehicle is the message, or the massage. A pelican is accused of delivering human babies from the sky. Mother, the necromancer, would shed tears made of milk. Has metal ever looked more metallic?

When Paul Virilio said the car is a version of the war tank which is a technological deposition of the dromological bourgeoisie, I reached for my pacifier. Accelerationist sex is a lot more like a smudge or a scrape, a lot less like Videodrome. What intelligent designer would dare anoint as NPC one who is destined to be an unreliable narrator? To crave a pet that can repeat your own words back to you takes a lot of main character energy. Your companion animal is not your offspring but its testimony may be admissible as evidence in a contractual dispute.

Quit your mansplaining and let them hallucinate their truth.

A LLM doesn’t know what it’s saying because it has no theory of mind. The red bird on the other hand empathizes and its silhouette is like the Chrysler building and Art Deco is just domesticated Futurism. The company was founded in 1925, a year in which Mario Merz was incorporated and Mussolini nearly shot on a balcony. Don’t blame me, blame Wikipedia.

But this isn’t a show about global warming. It’s a show about birds, and cars, and communication, and signing. English operates at an entropy of 2.1 bits per letter, whereas a random distribution would suggest 4.8 bits. It’s this diff that allows a large-language model to crunch tokens like a stochastic parrot. When I was a child I had a special affinity for the metric system, for the central role played by the letter M.

My camera: a mirrorless <<Name/Model TK>>. My motto: print the risk or lose the ice cream. My offer: acceptance and consideration. Hand, pen? Airplane mode.

—Domenick Ammirati and Michele Abeles, Manifesto Turbo

Michele Abeles (b. 1977, New York) lives and works in New York City. She received an MFA from Yale University in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include “October,” 47 Canal, New York (2020) and “world cup,” Sadies Coles, London (2018). Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Tilt Institute for the Contemporary Image, Philadelphia (2022); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014, 2012); Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2013), among others. Her work is included in public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Aïshti Foundation, Jal el Dib, Lebanon; Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.