Enantiomorphosis (On the Floor - Green, Blue, Wood) (2001) is made of wood painted a vivid blue and green, but the thing itself is shattered, like a Smithson envisioned or deconstructed by a Constructivist. Enantiomorphosis (Left or Right Hand Unit - Wood) (2001), is unpainted wood, which, because of the position of the mirror panel, looks from many angles as if there isn't a mirror present at all but empty space in other words, the eye is seeing something like its blindness, blind to what it's actually seeing. Roeder placed his two works on the floor of the triangular space the one most resembling Smithson's chambers looked like a chunky arrow from above, the tail made of one mirror panel and one empty panel frame. Smithson's work was made out of steel and painted with blue and green and hung on the wall. Roeder considered and reconsidered every aspect of what it means to present work for a show: low gallery's unorthodox occupation of two small non-contiguous storefronts, the photographic correlatives of his project, the two similar yet pointedly different press releases, one 'signed' by a diagram recalling Smithson's diagram for the chambers, and the other with Roeder's signature, as if the diagram and signature could stand for or reflect the other. Wells' The Country of the Blind (1911): 'They asked him if he still thought he could 'see'. The final statement, #7, was a quotation from H. It is an illusion without an illusion.' In a brief text from 1966, 'Interpolation of the Enantiomorphic Chambers', Smithson provided a diagram and statements with a 'paragraph from a fictive artist's journal'. In the work, 'it is as though one were being imprisoned by the actual structure of two alien eyes. Taking the piss out of Frank Stella's materialistic insistence on the non-extraperceptual, Smithson with Enantiomorphic Chambers negated 'any central vanishing point'. Robert Smithson (with fairy-godmotherly assistance from Minimalism's two Dans, Flavin and Graham) and his Enantiomorphic Chambers (1964), later destroyed, were the structural heart of Roeder's début solo show. Desire can only occur for what is not there, what is wanting, yet that absence allows Roeder to show the dream logic of Blondie 'signing' parallel lines while Buren 'signs' Parallel Lines.

For example, in Roeder's photograph, Blondie on Green and White (2000), the cover of Blondie's album is placed on top of Daniel Buren's green and white lines, wittily invoking Blondie's career-making third album ( Parallel Lines, 1978). As with the work of Elaine Sturtevant, the referent is obvious but not really the point. Repetition rather than imitation or appropriation may be the key to his enterprise rather than narcissism driving imitation, repetition plays out and with the trauma of looking.

A Better Place by Mark A. Roeder