The installation “Tomorrow’s Forecast: Strikingly Clear,” continues Handelman’s exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and power, and recalls previous investigations of the ideological correspondence between light, monumentality and heroic American landscape painting of the nineteenth century.

Handelman’s latest body of work is at once a series of architectural and pictorial interventions. The main gallery will feature a cycle of paintings that wraps around all four walls of the room. The visual field of the paintings is expanded by their mirroring reflections of adjacent walls and activated by the position and movement of viewers, at times incorporating their reflection within the imagery. Rendered in hues of stormy gray, purples and blues, the highly textured and nuanced surfaces lend a sense of urgency and catastrophic prediction that captivates the viewer in a complicated and undetermined relationship.

Based on a series of fragmentations, the room suggests the space of a corporate lobby, a panorama, an immersive virtual display, and the mediated field of advertising. For example, inverted fragments, vestiges and abstractions of the logo from a defense contractor (Northrop Grumman) emerge in and out of view within these “windows.” Here, the logo functions as readymade and cipher, visual presence and dysfunctional sign. 

The installation continues in an illuminated corridor running behind one of the walls of the main gallery. Aggressively lit and narrow, it houses a single painting. This area is meant to function as both a symbolic space and a psychological space, at once ordered and irrational. 

“It is a visceral space of vision, confrontation, and a void. I’m interested in what might be invisible but felt in one context –physiologically or psychologically, and how it carries over into another space, another experience, --a kind of stain,” as the artist states.