Derek Sullivan More Young Americans

What is the residue of abstraction? How does its signification change through time and through translation? Where does it appear in our everyday lives? Derek Sullivan’s recent work capitalizes on a key aspect of abstraction: its elusive, shifting, and at times arbitrary relationship to meaning. Borrowing from a wide array of bibliographic sources, Sullivan approaches the histories of modernist design, abstraction, and conceptual art as a floating field of signs, paying particular attention to recurring patterns and forms, and weaves them into new relations of signification with a deft sleight of hand. The resulting images seem familiar and evoke a curious sense of likeness, but ultimately they are impossible to pin down.

This is most evident in Illustrations for (and/or from) the book that is (and/or will be) titled More Young Americans (2011), a multi-part work posited as illustrations extracted from a missing book. The panels comprise drawings, paintings, collages, and found images that borrow from the visual language of geometric abstraction: the textile patterns of Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova, the modernist compositions of Frank Stella, and the Op art designs of Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. Some of Sullivan’s illustrations appear to be exercises in formal composition, while others excise images sourced from a variety of books, pamphlets, and catalogues; images that show young people engaging with familiar, abstract forms through production, juxtaposition, or play. Children climb on public sculptures, teenagers craft geometric designs at tables, and young people wear Op art inspired clothing. Placed together, the images highlight moments when vernacular abstraction becomes absorbed into popular culture, detached from a high-art context, and made ­fashionable — an irony, given the avant-garde status of abstraction throughout these years.