JANI ZUBKOVS

Jani Zubkovs’ Useless Photos
‘Weekend’ was on view at Sunrise Mart SOHO from November 2 - 23, 2023
By Anna Gregor

Jani Zubkovs’ first solo show was too good to—and almost too easy to—miss. Installed in the breezeway of Sunrise Mart SOHO’s entrance, it was easy to walk past without noticing it, much less recognizing it as art. For the biweekly rate of $5 per page (a steal in the world of pay-to-play gallery shows) Zubkovs’ four archival pigment prints arranged in a 2 x 2 grid were tacked onto the store’s bulletin board. Depending on the day, they were surrounded, and sometimes obscured, by a changing array of other sheets of paper with phone numbers on rip-off tabs advertising services and products. Photographs of defaced or eroded advertisements, Zubkovs’ prints, too, displayed phone numbers, names, and dollar signs. However, Zubkovs’ photos contained nothing of use to offer the viewer. In a location intended to provide access to useful information, they advertised only their uselessness. They withhold.

One might read this cynically. With the prevalence of pay-to-play galleries, it is easy to accuse art shows as being mere advertisements. Art, according to such a view, is nothing but another product in the mass market economy of daily life: buyable, reproducible, trashable. And while none of Zubkovs’ images themselves contained useful information, beneath them hung a bulletin board correlate of a gallery wall text complete with titles, date, medium, and Zubkovs’ website and Instagram handle––contact information with which an interested buyer might reach the artist to purchase a print.

But in this setting, Zubkovs’ photos resisted, or at least complicated, such a reading. Like the installation, the photos were easy to glance at and move on from. The utilitarian purpose of the bulletin board and the curious gaze of the potential client who approached it had to have been, if not frustrated by, at least interrupted by Zubkovs’ photographs of useless numbers and partial names. Though technically accessible to anyone, only someone with a curious eye who is willing to interrupt their trajectory toward their lunch would have stopped to look further at the enigmatic printouts––and they would have been rewarded. Prolonged looking revealed formal rigor and complex visual jokes captured by a sensitive eye. Whether inserted in daily life or hanging on a gallery wall, Zubkovs’ photos are moments of presentness that remind us of the beauty, absurdity, and humor of the constant stream of information and advertisements vying for our attention. Art, they claim, is not useful in the way a phone number is, nor does it exist in a realm separate from the market. But neither is it doomed to cynicism. Art is continuous with life. Inutile pieces of printed paper, the prints sat camouflaged at Sunrise Mart SOHO among other pieces of paper, which, in the future, battered by the elements or torn by careless hands, might themselves be transformed into Art through the aperture of Zubkovs’ camera and the gaze of an attentive viewer.