For two years Drew Heitzler and Flora Wiegmann have been operating as Champion Fine Art, providing fellow artists a venue in which to curate exhibitions outside of the commercial vortex. Flying largely under the radar—first in Brooklyn, now in Los Angeles—the exhibitions have been as diverse as the artists composing the checklists, and exhibition #2 (counting down from #21 toward planned obsolescence) is no exception. Curated by New York painter Michael Zahn, Carter Mull's large scale, site-specific photograph State of Shifting Mirrors, 2005, is the first monographic exhibition presented by Champion. Following from Mull's modestly sized series of elegant, aluminum-mounted prints of studio debris, the new work ramps up the affect and forces the issue of containment by covering the low, domestically scaled ceiling with an image of broken glass, splattered paint, construction illustrations, glitter, and other carefully selected refuse. Lit from below by wall-mounted fluorescent lights, State of Shifting Mirrors pushes its surface to hallucinatory heights even as is bears down on the viewer. Curator Zahn cites the inspiration of Barry Le Va, whose works reveal "an orchestral sense of their explication, of things made real, as opposed to merely literal." Mull's lens flattens his slagheap into a surface that tips real into a state of hyperreality, which reveals itself, weirdly, as abstraction in the mirror.
Artforum.com, September 12, 2005