In an endlessly looping video, a driverless motorcycle bucks and roars like an enraged bull, its handlebars chained to the flaking concrete ceiling of an abandoned industrial loft. As the chains grow taut it clumsily pirouettes, the engine kicking into a deafening whine while the bike briefly becomes airborne before crashing down, the madly spinning rear wheel spitting out debris like shrapnel. In the gallery itself, the floor is covered with entwined skid marks—some scorched deep into the plywood—made when this Austrian artist snaked his Honda through the long, narrow space, occasionally stuttering up the walls to create ersatz wainscoting. Like Pollock, whose empathetic gestures are frozen in the graceful arcs of his drip paintings, Dobler has captured his own movements through time and space, eschewing paint in favor of jerry cans of fuel and a gas mask for protection from clouds of burning rubber.
photo: Hubert Dobler/Jack the Pelican Presents
The wheel world
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Hubert Dobler
Jack The Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Avenue, Brooklyn
Through July 2
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