NEW YORK, NY.- On May 21st, Gavin Brown’s enterprise opened a solo exhibition of new and recent work by Ed Atkins, marking the artist’s first show with the gallery and the inauguration of the new gallery space on West 127th Street. The exhibition spans the three floors of the gallery, each level featuring distinct installations that use video, sound, and writing to explore digital media’s apparent immateriality in relation to representations of the physical – and specifically corporeal – world.

Beginning on the ground floor, Hisser (2015) erratically portrays a male figure in various states of loneliness, desperation, confusion, desire and fear. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know’, he says and sings as he lies helpless in bed, dreaming of a hellish nothing, a horror vacui made manifest and confused by the coded reality of the computer generated imagery and the dreams of a protagonist trapped within it. Like much of Atkins’ work, the video and its medium act as a kind of purgatory within from which their subjects cannot escape: in Hisser, a wretched bedroom in a permanent night performs as this prison, the only escape from which being an appeal to the intercession of the very earth to swallow him up.

Ribbons (2014), on the second floor, follows the self-debasement of a naked male figure tattooed with masochistic reminders. Speaking with Atkins’ voice and animated by his face, the figure smokes, drinking and sings a repertoire of sentimental, wallowing arias – the Purcell catch, ’Tis women makes us Love’, Randy Newman’s ‘I think it’s going to rain today’, and, with deflated acceptance, the ‘Erbarme Dich’ from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The situation loops in fragmented torment, coming together across the three screens to chorus the songs: moments of catharsis tempered by the protagonist’s eternal urge for empathy – an empathy hollowed out by the computer generated image’s ultimate unreality. Ribbons is a stream of dubious consciousness, a soliloquy that lurches between melancholy, horror and bodily fluids, a drunkenness that refuses to sober up and achieve an understanding that might finally return it to our reality.

On the third floor, Safe Conduct (2016) achieves a hysterical, stratospheric kind of catharsis: a slapstick, CGI ballet, burlesquing animated airport security videos, it caricatures the traumas which a body must capitulate to in order to pass in the eyes of the state. Security, here, is figured as a paranoiac state of exception that, perversely, pertains in perpetuity–eviscerating, quite literally, the subject – forcing them to become a soluble object. Hanging oppressively above the viewer, shown on a triptych of video walls, Safe Conduct shows a carousel of rendered bodies and their paltry accessories, titled after both the privileged document that bestows safe passage through enemy territory, and Boris Pasternak’s mid-life autobiography. Ravel’s Bolero provides the feverish, horribly familiar soundtrack, a modernist machine of a piece of music that drives the whole demented carousel.

Ed Atkins (b. 1982, London) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including: Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MOMA PS1, New York; La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC.