By Jason Isolini, June 10, 2025
Liminal zones of industrial decay and incipient commercialization offer a common vernacular for recent curation that diverges from market trends. At the unsuspecting exhibition site KAJE, located in Gowanus, Brooklyn, Gregory Kalliche’s show titled “Anvil” layers architecture and images via a skeletal interior wall forming a room for high-definition video animation. This membrane, synchronized with lighting and multi-channel sound, houses a theatrical 4K screening experience anchored to an altar-like plinth. On screen, a tabletop bench vice animates its handle sliding laterally through the vice collar, clinking slowly, rotating to open or close the jaws. The exhibition lighting flickers and flashes as objects orbit towards the crushing vice. Video moments both eerie and comic: the compression of a Bic lighter, an stress-relief ball, or a frog are navigated by these immersive lighting effects electrifying the space with rattling sound and color.
An anvil and a tabletop bench vice aren’t quite the same thing, although their visual characteristics overlay. Beyond the anvil’s cartoon legacy of squashing 2D foes, Kalliche’s work suggests perception as a series of focal planes. The exhibition title, referring to the solid metal surface for hammering, bending, and shaping objects, brings a flattening to the dense-mesh CGI one finds at the core of the gallery. Central to these mechanisms for mediating vision is the orthographic camera, integral to commercial modeling software, and a device that does not perceive depth like a traditional camera apparatus: as objects move farther away they don’t get smaller and parallel lines remain parallel, not converging with distance. This allows Kalliche to shift the focal plane in subtle but uncanny ways that don’t make sense in optical reality. Amid the visual tricks of manipulating distances on screen, it’s hard to ignore how compression, especially in the intimate palm of your hand, taps into one’s associations. Here, Kalliche’s animation of a stress ball being squeezed in the vice jaws before morphing into a high-voltage smiley face serves as an apt dopamine-laced metaphor.
On the exterior, the exposed steel framing is clad with three photographic compositions of deconstructed and staggered components of the bench vice and UV-printed on layers of transparent acrylic. The frog motif is intersected by an anatomical constellation, simultaneously referencing the gimbal mechanics of motion software and CGI’s own construction. Stacked together like cartridges, they expose hardware and bracing as a method of composite. Shadows merge between physically layered images, and those artificially printed. The works are unsurprisingly contemporary and bring to life intriguing propositions for image-based sculpture. Acting as digital exhaust, the still compositions suggest modes of working that operate beyond the virtual camera's gaze.
As a whole, the exhibition proposes that vision is a construction of lenses and architecture to be peeled away in order to grasp novel aesthetic forms. When considering the materialization of these ideas, one might look at the modern bench vise as a hybrid evolution of the anvil. However, Anvil designs images and spaces with technological filters to create cognitive connections, more like forcing opposing poles of two magnets together. Kalliche’s work reminds us that, while image-making systems may be complex, they are still grounded in tradition. However, the lenses through which we now view them distort objective reality, shifting focus to something else.
Today images cascade downward and invert branding publicly. Similarly, corporate brand consolidation employs visual cues—through logo design or spatial arrangements— to create associations or disassociations when it serves their purpose—redefining structure. Upon exiting KAJE, a thought emerged as I glanced at the restaurant-chain fusion/transposition taking place across the street— Popeye’s is Dunkin Donuts.
Jason Isolini is an artist whose solo exhibition “You’re Bringing Me Down” occurred at Picture Theory in 2024.
GREGORY KALLICHE "Anvil" (4K video with sound) installation view, 2025.
GREGORY KALLICHE Installation view of "Anvil" (4K video with sound), 2025.
GREGORY KALLICHE "frogjump0282 cel" 2025.
GREGORY KALLICHE "nitrocellulose+float0001 cel", 2025.
GREGORY KALLICHE "vise_xplod0001 cel" 2025.