ARTISTS

Bill Abdale

Project Space (2024)

Enclosed Lateral Movement

Bill Abdale is an artist based in New York. He has participated in numerous workshops and
residencies, including The Lower East Side Printshop (New York), SOMA (Mexico City), and
Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico). In the early 2010s he was a partner and co-curator at the
artist-run Heliopolis Project Space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He received an MFA from Hunter
College, CUNY and a BFA from Purchase College, SUNY.

Enclosure Lateral Movement comprises works that engage with urban settings in unexpected ways through a blend of
printmaking, photography, and installation. Set in familiar but unidentified locations, Abdale’s works evoke the anonymity of the city. Rather than documenting sites known for their historic significance or inherent beauty, the artist renders
mundane everyday spaces newly disorienting through deliberate glitches, discoloration, gaps and
cropping.

The exhibition derives its title from the screen printed work Enclosure Lateral Movement (2024), which
features an elongated image of a fenced-off lot. Intentional errors in the digital stitching of the
panoramic photograph disrupt the regularity of the chain-link fencing. This causes the viewerto
waver between perceiving it as a consistent pattern and recognizing its distorted state. The piece,
measuring over eleven feet wide, is divided into sections and dispersed throughout the gallery,
preventing it from being seen in its entirety at once.

Similarly, the installation Deselection Index (2024) is a single work divided into excerpted compositions
with irregularintervals of space between them. It features a series of thin strips of screen printed
plywood mounted vertically on the wall. These strips combine large areas of flat color with images of
office windows and other architectural surfaces. The resulting compositions offer variations on a
theme, butresist unification into a whole. While the printed surface is emphatically flat, traces of
color on the sides of the plywood reveal the methodical, layered process of building up the imagery.
Additionally, the plywood is fastened to hover slightly off the wall, emphasizing its three-dimensional
presence.

Though based on photographic source material, Abdale’s works seek a different approach to printed
objects, as well as new modes of displaying them. By manipulating the installation strategies and
spatialrelations between the pieces, the artist encourages a slowed-down, decentralized reading of
the work. This approach connects the sensory experience of viewing the exhibition to the immediate
presence of a place.