The cavernous space of the Power Station is held in darkness for three seconds before a timed photographic score begins. In Eleventh Avenue, 2025, Oto Gillen’s first video installation in the United States, synthetic flora bloom across a vertical panel, where bruised vermilions and sun-bleached purples tangle with shadows. On an opposing horizontal screen, architectural overhangs are flattened by cast light, their silhouettes reducing building facades into abstraction. Black is not absence—it is structure. From it, image and space fold into a singular field.
They arrive in waves—floral clusters punctuated by the odd appearance of a horse and buggy, a black SUV—before shifting to frames of scattered white lines. This expansive record, drawn from walks through Gillen’s home borough of Manhattan, encompasses more than two thousand photographs. Strung in sequence, this decade-long archive resembles a contact sheet, presumedly unculled. Resisting distillation, this accumulation prioritizes the act of searching over the specificity of any single image, favoring continuity over resolution.
The screen presents the blossoms at a scale that rewards slow looking. Yet while the sequencing frustrates full comprehension of an individual photo, the seriality finds resonance across the progression. Black is a shifting presence—the seam between pictures that binds frame to frame and space to screen. These voids are drawn from the subjects themselves, shifting subtly across arcs of time and bodies of work. For Gillen, black is the rhythm of return: a unifying ground, the steady force that anchors attention.
