Wade Guyton

“Supply chain issues”—who hasn’t heard that phrase in the last two years? Thankfully, the supply chain referred to in Wade Guyton’s new exhibition at Reena Spaulings extends only from the artist’s studio on the Bowery to the gallery on East Broadway. Known for exploring the relationship between work and production, here Guyton playfully extends that thesis to his own art-making and exhibitions.

Some works reveal the intricacies of their own making, such as a photograph of a print in its press, and the rainbowed edge of what appears to be a Xerox machine. In one work, Guyton reproduces the homepage of nytimes.com. A banner ad for Louis Vuitton dominates the top third of the work, while a map of Coronavirus’s impact on Europe takes second stage. Like many of the works on view, it is split vertically down the center and slightly misaligned—one’s eye is drawn irrevocably back to the physical construction of the image.

The works clash curiously with Reena Spauling’s environs, including an acid-green print of a still life rotated 90 degrees, set against a much larger blank canvas along with requisite marks of printing disturbance, placed against a window that bears the marks of the Chinese business that used to occupy the space. Guyton plays with depth by juxtaposing a print of Manhattan’s skyline—also vertically split, with a stretch of bare canvas across the bottom—with a peculiar feature of the gallery: two double sets of barred metal doors leading nowhere. —Lisa Yin Zhang