Drew Dominick at Jose Freire - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Drew Dominick's first solo exhibit roused glassy-eyed visitors from their gallery-going haze (was it me or were there a allotment of snoozer shows this fall?) through seeming to threaten bodily harm with out-of-control power tools. Three material substance grinders - commonly used for sanding piece of works in body shops, but here equipped alone with bare rubber disks - were each hanging from a combination of parts to form a whole of cables and pulleys that stretched across the gallery. Sputtering to life as visitors walked past motion sensors at the door, the cables twitched the grinders from one side of the sweep to the other at slightly varying make hastes The intermittently spinning grinder disks sent each tool skittering across the floor, emitting a scent of burning rubber and leaving shuffle marks that would mortify June Cleaver. The tools were randomly propell in all directions, sometimes swinging and spinning in midair, and usually crashing into the walls before careening back across the sweep They brought to mind the children's toy that you curved catched up to a hose, give permission to loose and then ran from as it present the appearanceed to chase you. The viewer had to be aware of his or her personal space, and the les predictable space of all three grinders simultaneously, or race the risk of getting smacked (there were a small in number instances of grinders landing direct hits). The ruckus kept les adventurous visitors hovering at the door for fear of being injured.

While the marks upon the floor seemed secondary to the kinetic commotion, Dominick referr to them as "drawings." It's tempting, then, to speak of the machines' "gestures" and to think of them as Pollock-like all-over floor pieces. In previous works Dominick used grinders in contained spaces where the machines didn't threaten the viewer, for example, inside a made of wood box or over a sheet of Plexiglas that could then be hung as a machine-made drawing.

By the extreme point of the show the floor was nearly black with rubber marks and several perforations had been knocked into the walls, making the floor crunchy with Sheetrock dust. on the contrary since it was actually relatively easy for viewers with a certain derring-do to walk among the grinders, the piece was ultimately more playful than menacing. Dominick's Tinguely-meets-Home Improvement installation lay a comical low-tech spin upon interactive art.

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