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outfits and stances that closely resemble his in style andattitude. Next, a voiceover details a self-consciousencounter between the two filmmakers that occurred inBerlin’s apartment, where their identities temporarilyinteracted in a somewhat elusive exchange.In contrast to the film, the installation version ofEncounters at 2nd Floor Projects offered a view of thework as an exploded diagram that reformatted an oftenimmaterial or theatrical experience of the film. In thisinstance, visitors moved through an activated experienceof the project that related more closely than thecinematic version to Garnett’s ecstatic perceptions ofBerlin's relationship to images of his own body.Ultimately, this multimedia portrait sensitively depicted aprominent gay figure who helped shape the publicimages of queer culture and homosexuality with a simultaneousintertwining of Garnett’s own personal perspectivesand reflections on his life in a compassionate andcareful way.—Emma TramposchJACK WHITTEN / ANGEL OTEROSAVANNAH, GASide-by-side solo painting exhibitions Jack Whitten:Erasures [December 18, 2012−March 31, 2013] andAngel Otero: Material Discovery [February 8−May 5,2013] at the SCAD Museum of Art presented a uniqueopportunity to view an intergenerational dialog betweentwo significant bodies of work that have impactedprocess-based abstract painting. Although Whitten andOtero demonstrate distinct processes in their individualpractices, their shared desire and propensity to continuallyinvestigate paint materials connects these artists⎯and ultimately displaced the boundaries between thetwo separate museum gallery spaces.Erasures presented paintings and works on paperfrom the mid-to-late 1970s by Whitten, during the periodwhen he was living and working in New York and wasone of the first artists to participate in Xerox Corporation’sartist-in-residence program. The references and inspirationfor the works in Erasures were clearly linked tomachine printing processes. The mechanical movementof lines of ink across paper surfaces produced the resultingsmudged and suspended ink and toner markingsthat became the beginnings of the very early developmentof Whitten’s signature pull technique—a method ofpouring and dragging thick layers of acrylic paint overthe canvas with squeegees, rakes, and Afro combs.Many of the paintings in Erasures incorporated amonochromatic palette with thin horizontal or verticallines of paint that covered the entire surface of thecanvases. To remove the subjectivity of gestural marks,Whitten fabricated giant comb-like tools, inspired by asimple experiment using an Afro comb, to pull acrosslayers of poured paint. These tools gave the paintings thelook of being made with mechanical precision, and theeffect of having been produced by a single operation orgesture, which further distanced the work from anyapplication or gesture by the artist’s hand. The combhad the additional effect of revealing hidden informationunderneath the layers of shapes and lines, embeddedand suspended like ghost images that didn’t fully print.The surfaces of these works appear to hover, almost asa reverberating, vibrating noise atop the surface.The entryway of the gallery provided a glimpse ofhistorical context by featuring three of Whitten’s earlyexperiments on paper for which he used pastel andpowdered pigment to create smudged lines and marksacross the surface. The traces of pigment were leftsuspended in swaths of gray horizontal and diagonallines. These three works revealed some of the artist’searlier techniques and thinking that would inform thelater and even more mechanically processed paintings.Color in Whitten’s works is by no means completelyerased, and because of his predominant use of black,white, and gray, the subtleties of color that sporadicallydrag, zip, and streak through the surfaces are evenmore noticeable. The warm gray and yellow rectangularshapes in Sigma IV (1977–1978) are simultaneouslyrevealed and hidden underneath thin horizontal blackand-whitelines. Looking at this painting is like lookingthrough window blinds and trying to make sense of aroom or space beyond them; the eye’s focus oscillatesconstantly between the blinds themselves and theshapes of things they partly obscure. All of the visualinformation is clearly on the surface of the canvas inWhitten’s paintings, but they carry this strange opticaleffect of depth and movement. Although the titleErasures implied removal, and quelled notions of thegestural hand, these works were anything but absent.In the adjacent exhibition, Material Discovery by NewYork-based Otero, we were presented with eight newand recent paintings that demonstrated very differentmethods of handling the effect of gesture and markmakingin painting. Otero’s development of a techniqueand process was, like Whitten’s, deeply influenced byhis own questioning of material and investigations intothe transformative properties of paint through varyingprocesses.For Otero, denying his own gesture entails first applyingmultiple, thick layers of oil paint onto glass panels,ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: Jack Whitten, Sigma IV, 1977–1978, acrylic on canvas, 64 x 63.5 inches [courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates]; Angel Otero, Untitled, 2010, oil paint skins collagedon canvas, 78 x 62.5 x 4 inches [collection of Ninah and Michael Lynne; courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York and Hong Kong]62 ART PAPERSFuture Anterior