“Two large-format color photographs anchor the main gallery. An image of the U.S. Air Force’s B2 Spirit stealth nuclear bomber, seen from far overhead and silhouetted against a wide flat field of crimson red, is installed opposite a perspectival view of an aging and half-illuminated sign erected in France in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both photographs are the result of over a decade of intensive field and studio work, during which Blank first had to obtain governmental approval to access his subjects, and then extensively reworked the visual representation of each.

Alluding to the graphic and revolutionary sensibilities of Lissitzky, Rodchenko, and Malevich, and formatted to the aspect ratio of national flags, the two works are bridged by images of firework blasts that might alternately signal celebrations or munitions. The present-day realities of consensus politics and mechanized death are abstracted by images that borrow their authority from a time of utopian faith in social and technological perfectability.

Three nearly identical black-and-white photographs from a larger group of sixteen such images are installed in the gallery’s project room. Each shows the name of a different city in raised relief, casting shadows against a field of gray. Similarly recalling fascist-era typography or title treatments from noir cinema, TOKYO, LONDON, and NEW YORK might read just as plausibly as either a list of potential bombing sites or fashion shopping franchises.

In fact the signs were photographed on the architectural fascia of the (then) new Times Square headquarters of (now dissolved) Lehman Brothers, where each of the city names was intended to denote an interchangeable node in the network of global finance. Writ large and encased behind screens of industrially-produced acrylic, the images are made available to close inspection, but impenetrable just the same.

All of Blank’s subjects are recorded with the same painstaking clarity and abundant detail, suggesting that access to even an infinite amount of information is never a guarantor of knowable experience.”