As He Sees It

J Jan Groeneboer recognizes that the views from his Sunset Park studio are almost too symbol-laden. “If you were a writer and you made up this landscape, it would be heavy-handed,” the artist told a crowd at The Kitchen’s temporary gallery at Westbeth Artists Housing, describing the technoindustrial pastoral outside his window. He may have come to this urban panorama by chance when he leased the workspace, but as the title of his new video installation suggests, his methods were anything but: deliberate, even meditative, with footage shot over a two-and-a-half-year period, but also personal, as when the camera pans a little shakily or the pitter-patter of Groeneboer’s daily life is overheard.

Selected Views, whose short stint at the Kitchen concluded on January 20, unfolded across three screens. In the work, eerily beautiful skies change color because of distant wildfires, which artist Zoe Leonard, one of three panelists who joined Groeneboer for the public event, described as a “tension between the sublime and the dystopian.” Around sunset, gallery hands pulled up …