Thomas Erben is pleased to present Is-ness the last exhibition at his current location. Included is the work of Thomas Florschuetz, Rashawn Griffin, and Lynn Marie Kirby. Each artist departs with seemingly ordinary moments, objects, or the body, and, manipulating them conceptually as well as formally, opens up a field of historical reference. Never just a visual record of a given thing or place, each artist re-sees the objects, materials, and places they work with to capture what the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector calls “the is-ness of the thing”.

Thomas Florschuetz, who grew up in East Germany, is widely considered the major proponent of the “Other German Photography”. Unlike the objective monumentality of the Becher School, he captures the non-places of architectural space and the un-dramatic fragments of our bodies to call attention to the presence and singularity of things. On view is a triptych from 1994/98 of enlarged fragments of fingers. Once excerpted, they become a whole again through an act of “seeing discovery”. Florschuetz’ work has been exhibited internationally. Most recently, he has had solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, and the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK.

A recent recipient of his MFA in sculpture from Yale University, Rashawn Griffin also holds a BFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Often negiotiating the boundaries between his two studied mediums, Griffin utilizes objects and materials in ways that are conceptually subtle. 30,000 friends, a “relief painting” of accumulated jelly beans, suggests both its own formal possibilities as well as its inevitable disintegration. Similarly, the linen and fabric “sculptures”, as well as the off-handed installations of grass, debris, and mixed media wall works, each negotiate object, image, and material in ways that are both casual and poetic. First seen in New York this spring at Triple Candie, Griffin’s work will be included in Frequency this Fall at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Working with the interstices of film and digital media and the gaps in media representational systems, Lynn Marie Kirby transforms often ignored parts of our lives into meditations on both, the technology through which we see, and the broader significance of the quotidian. For To Have and to Hold, 2004, she exposed 16 mm film without a camera in a Wedding Chapel in Reno, Nevada. The processed film was then manipulated in a film-to-digital-transfer-machine where added rhythms and colors create a meditation on this American site and this historical inflection point, the movement of film to the digital realm. Kirby currently teaches at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her work was an outstanding contribution to the Whitney’s Bitstreams exhibition in 2001. Numerous solo exhibitions and screenings include: MoMa, Centre Georges Pompidou, San Francisco Cinematheque (retrospective) and the Toronto Film Festival.