Fully Filtered, Artruss
Chicago, IL
Solo, April 19 - June 13, 2025
As we move through this world we leave a whisper trail of hair, skin, dust and oil that collects in the spaces we inhabit. In the same way film collects and traps light in the accumulation of emulsion, we deposit imperceptible traces that build and record our presence. Ari Norris (b. 1995) elevates this shadow record by creating oversize filters that capture and arrest the offcut gestures of his practice. At the exaggerated scale of 48x48 inches, the drips and scuffs caught on Norris’ studio dropcloths wriggle like a party of amoebas under a microscope, inviting the viewer to examine the secondary product of the artist's hand. It is an unintentional vocabulary of marks, incoherent but lyrical. An echo that impels us to reach for meaning.
Viewers of Norris’ work expect this magnetic draw. Previous examples of his sculptures wink and beguile, beckoning the viewer closer with an uncanny angle or skewed proportion. Rubber bands appear languidly indifferent to gravity, a tower of filing cabinets careens vertiginously, seemingly frozen just before crashing to the ground, a plate of brie and triscuits materializes out of bronze like something dug out of the ashes of Pompeii. Norris achieves this sleight of hand with a deft manipulation of material and fabrication. The success of the illusion is in the mastery of his craft.
If there is one thing this exhibition asks of visitors, it is to look closely. However, there is a reverse voyeurism simultaneously at play. The monumental eyeglasses, a bow to minimalist artist Charlotte Posenenske, reduce the gallery and those inside to dollhouse size. The glasses, cleverly constructed from plywood, perfectly imitate the shape and scale of ductwork, Posenenske’s preferred medium. Looming like the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, the glasses reflect our gaze inward, somewhat uncomfortably. The ductwork sculpture conceptually loops the exhibition into a HVAC ouroboros, connecting to the filters on the wall as they would in reality. With a smirk, Norris reminds us that we leave a litter of interactions and gestures that create an impression of our character. He pokes us to consider how we are arrested in the swirling petri dish of memory.
— Esther Espino
Press:
Ruins in Reverse: Ari Norris at Artruss
May 28, 2025 Samuel Schwindt for Newcity
Artruss slabs just before a grimy bridge underpass. It’s a quotidian atmosphere—industrial and quick-service (like the McDonald’s down the street). Ricocheting inside, Ari Norris’ solo exhibition “Fully Filtered” is that cig at the end of the day on the construction site nearby.
Norris’ tongue-trip painting-adjacent works begin on the right then beckon ad infinitum to the left. “Gesture Arrestor #4” is the first corrugated drop cloth masked in geometric trellis. Shoe-print scuffs and peeling-paint scabs become signals to a beguiling process interior to Norris; it’s the artist’s tertiary palette turned painting substrate. The industrial gestalt of it all is homophonic: palette (painting), pallet (transport structure) and palate (just the residue of a taste). It’s withholding in perpetuity, constantly making withdrawals. Smokes and tinges. It’s not perfect repetition; the armored grids are different sizes, there’s diverse splatters, some canvases are sliced, smacked and sealed. Speckles upon speckles upon droops upon drools upon drops. “Gesture Arrestor #5 (patched)” grimaces after a quick mop of a microfiber cloth.
The grounded monstrosity in the center is a stagnant utterance excavated from the gutter (gutter not as an epithet, but something like the seam and guts of a building). “Spectacle of Spectacles” grids the same pattern as the painting structures. It’s another homophone work, this time derived from minimalist Charlotte Posenenske. Described in the exhibition statement as being spectacles (glasses) intertextually culled, the audience becomes “doll house size” when inside (apparently). There’s a difference, though, between monumental sculpture shrinking the viewer or making them aware of their own body—and “Spectacle of Spectacles” does the latter. At the opening, a quick skulk and surveil were all people seemed to do in the center of the sculpture. That viewing nook didn’t shrink, but it repulsed and became absent. It’s the vanishing point of the show, not the focal point.
In the spirit of referentially purveying, think of Robert Smithson’s “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967). Documenting the area’s “monuments,” Smithson paradoxically allegorized fountains and bridges (even sexualized). He wouldn’t surmise “a crass anthropomorphic conclusion,” so he demurely said to himself, “It was there.” Smithson prognosticated in that manner: a little sneaky but sardonically ironic. Smithson admired “zero panorama” and “ruins in reverse,” becoming debris as architectural blueprint so they “rise into ruin before they are built.” This falls in line with Posenenske—always an art-world misanthrope, the work aligned in that manner. Martin Herbert’s thoughts on her “Square Tube Series” were that they didn’t allow audience interaction. Or, for her view, the consumers. This is Herbert musing on her closing of a New York show: “Picture Charlotte Posenenske looking down, half-amused. Picture her looking away.”
An HVAC engineer in arrested development, Norris’ inert monuments are grub and then guts; a preservation gesture kept in prep forever. It’s hard not to remark on the cliché gripe of Chicagoans witnessing empty machines along the never-ending Kennedy highway rebuild; those trucks are ready to pave, but always just preparing. It’s those manners of refusal versus refuse, of when stagnation equals progress or, just, equals stagnation.
The in-process-in-stasis feeling for Norris is a romantic one, though. The white noise of air ducts languorously breathes. Its entropic trick is a trip. Not a stumble; a flick-to-splat long speculation. When the cig chars to the filter, this solo exhibition says: admire the ash. Ari Norris “Fully Filtered” at Artruss, 4553 West Diversey.