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Harsh  Patel CLEOPATRA'S 110  Meserole  Avenue March  2–March  30 Harsh  Patel’s  New  York  debut  presents  a  knee-­high  platform covered  edge  to  edge  with  monochrome  plotter  prints,  in  which graphics  interleave  bits  of  signs,  photographs,  and  mysterious symbols  into  an  obscure  iconography.  One  panel,  Blix,  2014,  is  a specimen  sheet  for  an  LED  font  that  recalls  Mick  Haggerty’s digitized  silhouettes  on  the  cover  of  The  Police’s  1981  record Ghost  in  the  Machine  ,  which  has  been  overlaid  with  the  shadows of  gothic  hardware:  chains,  hooks,  and  dagger  shapes  that  float over  the  strict  grid-­logic  of  the  letterforms  (each  plane  suggests  a different  sort  of  torture). Patel’s  body  of  work  inhabits  a  twilight  region  that  resists  the distinctions  of  art  or  design,  printing  or  publishing.  Over  the  years, his  several  micro-­presses  (with  names  such  as  3DX,  Zulu,  and Sister)  have  produced  numerous  small  books.  Like  Ed  Ruscha’s “Twentysix  Gasoline  Stations,”  they  flaunt  their  physical cheapness.  The  eight  panels  on  view  in  this  show  incorporate motifs  from  a  variety  of  his  past  productions,  which  over  the  years have  encompassed  various  forms  of  printing  and  distribution. In  2009,  a  discography  of  the  late-­1980s  New  Zealand  music label  Xpressway  appeared  as  a  stapled  book  numbered  “Sister 5”,  set  in  an  elegant  serif  font  as  if  a  catalogue  raisonné.  Other numbered  objects  include  tote  bags,  books  of  poems,  a  series  of still-­lifes,  postcards,  one-­inch  buttons,  and  a  curiously  frightening View  of  “New  Typography,”  2014. red  book  titled  PASSWORDS  in  stark  black.  The  words  and symbols,  painstakingly  whittled  out  of  any  context,  are intermingled  like  the  archaeology  of  obsessions  in  a  teenager’s  notebook.  Phrases  and  icons  repeat  until  they take  on  the  quality  of  a  mantra.  In  2011,  Patel  composed  a  photocopied  booklet  titled  Bruce  Lee  for  the  Swiss zine  press  Nieves.  Lee  appears  here  as  well,  tall  and  brawny  adjacent  the  curves  of  a  Fraktur-­like  letterform—or part  of  one—which,  like  all  these  works,  is  distorted  by  the  folding  of  the  material  onto  itself,  and  in  the  process achieves  a  kind  of  autonomy.     —  Zachary  Sachs

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