Deferred Demolition

“Would you like a pen?” I hear someone say behind me as I struggle to take notes with my dried-up old Bic. “We have plenty in the back.” NICOLE CHARLES, co-owner of Project 107gestures toward a dark corner of the room where shelves on wheels hold miscellaneous art supplies. The art gallery is located in a small modernist building that is slated for demolition. With a fresh pen in hand, I fire one last question: I ask where Project 107 is moving when the building is torn down. “We’re just packing things up and putting them in storage,” replies Charles.

The same building is the setting for, and the object of CRISTIAN ORDÓÑEZ’s new large-format photography exhibition, Displace, which opened on January 5. The exhibition marks the culmination of a year-long collaboration between Ordóñez and the gallery. “Nicole and [co-owner] Justin [Pape] found this space,” Ordóñez told me, “and I started visiting them and working with them on projects.” On his frequent visits to the building, he began noticing certain quirks—an aborted renovation project, a stained carpet, a desiccated plant left behind in an empty office—that he eventually thought to record.

The photographs are mounted on thin wooden structures. Anchored to the wall and to the ground, the displays venture into the space of the gallery itself. “There are corners, areas where you have to go in and discover new images; it recreates the way that I discovered spaces while moving through the building,” said Ordóñez. Speaking of his decision to print the photographs in newsprint paper, Ordóñez said that he wanted to evoke the fragility and impermanence of the space: “Unlike what you might expect from fine art prints, newsprint will disappear over time. It’s a metaphor, in a way, about how this place is also going to disappear.”