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    • XVII

      • Colleen Asper Labor with Rectangle
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom
      • Triple Candie Exhibition Preparations
      • Sean Raspet 2GFR24SMEZZ2XMCVI5L8X9Y38ZJ2JD…
      • Owen Kydd Handheld
      • Dan Levenson Notes From Jessica
      • Julia Rommel Easy Tacker
      • Jordan Kantor MAN(ET/DE)GAS
      • Sreshta Rit Premnath The Last Image
      • OJO The Adventures of Nuclear Wad & How He Learned To Stop Dreaming
    • XVI

      • Julia Sherman Re-Claiming Susan B. Anthony
      • Robert Hult Hasidic Street Posters in Brooklyn
      • Runo Lagomarsino Pedro’s Story: An Unsuccessful Transatlantic Traveller
      • John Houck Pine Ridge: An interview with Jim Houck
      • Brian Zegeer Dragoman of Little Syria
      • Sidney Russell Kuna Yala Swag
      • Desirée Holman Outer Spaces: Part I
      • Faith47 The Unexpected Present
      • Carmen Winant Personal Best
      • Philip-Lorca diCorcia Red Bull Snake
    • XV

      • Jessica Green & Tom Griffiths Terra Incognita (A Video Game Folly)
      • Prem Krishnamurthy The People’s Representation: On Staged Graphics in Klaus Wittkugel’s Work
      • Cian O'Day N/A, or On the Dark Stores of Brian Ulrich
      • I am simply ‘shopping’ for pictures.
        —Brian Ulrich to Jörg Colberg in YVI magazine

        Brian Ulrich, Saks Fifth Avenue, 2009


        ONE — I run my hand over the plate glass window. It’s cold and flecked with wintry dust. I contemplate the dust. This snow has transmuted through three states of being — liquid, gas, solid — traveled unknowable miles through the heavens, and tested the divining powers of the local weatherman. Then snow meets our atmosphere. Choked exhaust fumes and bad cosmic jokes. To dissolve snow, we spread salt on streets and sidewalks.

        Salt made the Phoenicians rich, bankrolled Roman wars, and substituted as soldier’s pay during the War of 1812. Salt served as the fulcrum on which a skinny Indian man turned a cause into a movement and himself into Gandhi.

        We throw it on the ground. In the United States, road salt is a billion dollar industry. Salt drops the freezing point of snow, creating dirty pools of winter muck. When snow meets salt, we are left with neither, just residue, like the residue under my window-pressed palm. Heaven-sent is now simply a piece of shit, stuck to the cold window of a dimmed and dead Hollywood Video.
         

        Brian Ulrich, Chicago Place Mall, 2009


        TWO — When I was a child I was obsessed with baseball cards, small squares of cardboard bearing photographs of and information about people I did not know. I didn’t even like baseball all that much. Still I would run down to the card shop with money earned from odd jobs to hand the store’s creepy proprietor crumpled dollar bills in exchange for packets of these small squares of cardboard. The moment would quicken my heart rate, a pulse would thunder in my throat. The brief but dangerous flirtation with heroin as a young adult should have come as a surprise to no one.
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         
         

        Brian Ulrich, Cinema I–IV, 2008


        THREE — The incandescent light bulb changed the world. Its mechanism was simple if elegant, a metal filament wire heated until glowing. Reproducing it was easy. Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb — a technology extant for decades by the time he filed for the relevant patents — he merely designed one workably efficient and devised a comprehensive system to make lighting it economically viable.

        The fluorescent lamp, on the other hand, does not qualify as a revolution. The Geissler tube, a mid-nineteenth century novelty of colored lights, caused phosphors to fluoresce to entertain crowds in dimly lit rooms. Many inventors, Edison included, dabbled in fluorescent lighting, but the process proved too delicate and too difficult to reproduce until after the incandescent bulb lit the developed world. In the 1930s, scientists at General Electric finally uncovered an efficient method to excite mercury vapor to produce ultraviolet light to, in turn, set a phosphor aglow.

        An incandescent bulb burns hot to produce its light. To us, nourished by the sun and warmed by campfire, the hot light appears natural. A fluorescent lamp’s operation is complex, the light it emits cold. Fluorescent lamps cost more than incandescent bulbs. Their efficiency renders them, in the long accounting, a bargain. Such savings allow companies to string up fluorescent lamps in long rows and run them endlessly until they flicker and burn out. The cost of fluorescent lighting is not hidden in some unlit recess of our economy, it is exacted everywhere.
         

        Brian Ulrich, Circuity City, 2008


        FOUR — “I’m looking for a Taylor Swift album.”

        “What?” She raises an eyebrow.

        “A Taylor Swift album, I’m not sure which one. The one with that song on it, you know?”

        “Sir, this is a Marshalls.” She narrows her eyes.

        “There’s the self-titled debut, Fearless, and Speak Now. I think it’s Fearless but I’m not sure.”

        “If you want to buy a shirt I can help you but I don’t know shit about Taylor Swift.” She crosses her arms.

        “But this was once a Circuit City. I want to pay $18 for a CD. Do they still make CDs?”

        “Sir. This. Is. A. Marshalls. We sell clothes. We sell shoes and belts. We sell blankets and spatulas. We sell clothes so fast we don’t even bother to clean up the racks.” She motions her hand to the atmosphere around us.

        “But I don’t see anything.”
         

        Brian Ulrich, Frank’s Nursery, 2008


        FIVE — At Lowe’s in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, I once saw in person the actor who played Marlo Stanfield on The Wire. I love The Wire. I share with people all the time my belief that The Wire is the best fiction of any kind created during the Aughts. As opinions go, my stance on The Wire is a very important one to me.

        After smiling stupidly at Marlo Stanfield, I wandered around Lowe’s for two hours looking for a mirror. I didn’t find the mirror I needed or any other. I left, defeated and numb, my arms free as I shuffled through a near desolate parking lot that emptied into an asphalt confluence bridging the Gowanus Canal.

        Cian O’Day is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He studied misanthropy at the University of Chicago, perfecting it while working in children’s publishing. People pay him to look at photographs and, sometimes, write about sports and other ridiculous topics. To read his personal essays and find his works published elsewhere check his website, cianoday.com.

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      • Yasmeen M. Siddiqui Avatar Gone Analog: Musings on The Bridge Project by Do Ho Suh
      • Emily Larned ARTS 02–2011: The Artist-Created Institution as Art Practice
      • Yoonjai Choi & Ken Meier Interview with Metahaven
      • Aaron Kunin Space and Place in Two Video Installations by Amie Siegel
      • Tom Griffiths Interview with Barbara Griffiths
    • XIV

      • Colleen Asper & Justin Lieberman In Conversation
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report To The Committee On Periodical Group Exhibitions
      • Ryan Mrozowski & Mike Womack Before-Biennial-After
      • Kay Rosen Waiting for Michael Asher
      • Kate Gilmore Drag
    • XIII

      • Talia Chetrit Van Hanos’s Harlem Studio
      • Mieke Marple The Lives of Objects at The Suburban
      • Laurel Nakadate Island Light
      • C.D. Parker Draw Me a Pie Chart Powerfully
      • Alan Reid Despondent Babysitter
      • Lucy Kim & Leeza Meksin Art Crimes
    • XII

      • Anonymous On Looking at Nature: An Untitled Petition on Crapomimicry
      • Paul Huf Musical Box with a Dancing Ballerina
      • Lance Wakeling Voluntary Sculptures: Photographing the Unmonumental
      • David Kennedy-Cutler Possession Obsession
      • Nine Budde Stopping by at a Friends’ Place
      • Cody Trepte Untitled (Something Clever Here)
    • XI

      • Adam Helms Hirschhorn at Gladstone Gallery
      • David Scanavino Fact or Fiction
      • Jason Tomme The Voodoo of Robert Irwin
      • Kristin Posehn The Rocks of Rocklin
      • Joanne Greenbaum Decorating the Void: On Clay and Dirt on Delight
    • X

      • Jennifer Dudley Interview with Daniel Bozhkov
      • Dushko Petrovich & Roger White Report to the Committee on Decentered Practices
      • Shana Lutker Artists Are Not
      • Steve Cairns & Isla Leaver-Yap Blind Carbon Copy
      • Katarina Burin Rooms No One Lives In
      • Jonathan Bogarin What’s Your Context?
      • Sara Greenberger Rafferty Master of None
    • IX

      • Andrea Hill Fact, Factoid, Factotum
      • Nicholas Weist We’re Interested in Your White Horse
      • Tyler Coburn Ronnie Bass at I-20
      • Allison Kave Doa Aly and Juan William Chavez
      • Gillian Sneed Interview with Adam Pendleton
    • VIII

      • Jacob Hashimoto Interview with Luis Gispert
      • Lilly McElroy Guy Maddin’s Winnipeg
      • Kevin Zucker Thematic Apperception Test
      • Ian Cooper That’s What He Said
      • Colleen Asper Interview with Matt Borruso
    • VII

      • Mieke Marple Interview with Michelle Grabner
      • Farrah Karapetian Reframing Mirrors and Windows
      • Ruby Sky Stiler That’s What She Said
      • Spencer Finch New Zealand Light
      • Dana Frankfort John Walker: Text in/and Painting
      • The Editors Whitney Biennial 2008
    • VI

      • Katie Herzog Bay Area Figurative Language
      • Matt Connors Teignmouth Electron by Tacita Dean
      • Connelly LaMar New Photography 2007 at MOMA
      • Ethan Greenbaum Inside Lights
      • Matthew Lancit Cleaning Magritte’s Pipe
    • V

      • Roger White Jay Heikes at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Interview with Michael DeLucia
      • Erin Shirreff Michel Auder: The Feature
      • Jessica Lansdon Interview with Brian Bress
      • Lisha Bai Suzanne Song at Michael Steinberg Fine Art
    • IV

      • Mariah Robertson Conditions in Time
      • Jacob Feige Psychopathia Pastoralis
      • Eric Golo Stone Interview with George Kontos
      • Skyler Brickley Keith Tyson at PaceWildenstein
      • Lumi Tan Curatorial Project with Jo-ey Tang
    • III

      • George Rush Wayne Gonzales at Paula Cooper
      • Jacqueline Cooper Margaret Wall-Romana at Bucheon Gallery
      • Ana Wolovick Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein
      • Skyler Brickley Nicholas Krushenick at Marianne Boesky
      • Luke Stettner Peter Young at PS1
      • Ethan Greenbaum Daniel Gordon Interview
    • II

      • Christine Frerichs Rebecca Morris at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery
      • Skyler Brickley Josh Smith at Luhring Augustine
      • Ethan Greenbaum Kristen Baker at Deitch Projects
    • I

      • Mark Barrow On Abstraction
      • Tova Carlin Superstudio
      • Julia Weist Johannes Vanderbeek at Zach Feuer
      • Skyler Brickley Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern
      • Ethan Greenbaum Cement Garden at Marvelli Gallery