Books On Books

At the base of this sculpture is The Times Concise Atlas of the World, and at its top, The Observer’s Book of Manned Space Flight (No. 48). These two elements of the piece resonate with its rocket-like thrust, metallic gantry-like frame and micro-chip nodes, as does the textbook on projective geometry. Euclidean geometry describes shapes “as they are” while projective geometry describes them “as they appear”.

It is hard to suss what Walter Starkie’s picaresque travelogue about life with the Roma (Raggle Taggle) or Cyril Connolly and Jerome Zerbe’s picture book on 18th century French “pavillons” or Yehiel Dinur’s autobiographical novel of his post-holocaust life in Israel (Ka-Tzetnik 135633, House of Love) have to do with the rest of it.

Art composed of found elements is like that, I suppose. Just enough connectedness to suggest order and intentionality, just enough disconnectedness to suggest disorder and randomness. Ulian’s other works, incorporating electronic parts soldered together in “microchip synapses” and “technological mandalas”, however, imply other tensions — between technology and the human, the digital and the spiritual.  Or in the case of his Contrived Objects (wooden tennis rackets, microchips and copper wire), between the physical and the artificially cerebral.

Ulian’s more recent work has changed from that of 2010-11 (A fragile forest and From zero to one).  Even though some of the themes, materials and techniques are the same, the more recent works (those noted above) are more focused, self-contained, polished, static and perhaps decorative. I suspect there may be another cycle and even more engaging art coming from this artist.