“Rooms With Rooms and Games,” Nathaniel Robinson’s fifth solo show with Devening Projects, sure is an odd one. For anyone who principally associates the artist with his paintings—often small, sweet, sodden with nostalgia, but too chilly to be sentimental—”Rooms” is jarring. Each high-tension, jewellike installation is suspended cleverly in space, mounted on individualized bracket systems married to their sculptural forms. One is left afloat amid an archipelago of works that know their place in the gallery’s environment, and feels it. 

In this way, the show is rivetingly uninviting. So self-contained are works like Room With Closet and Droppings and Room With Large Paintings that they don’t particularly need their viewers. Many occupy forms that require navigation, stooping and peering, careful intrusive transits through their personal space. Often the reward for engaging is to be met with a mirror, a sudden and humiliation-tinged reminder of your own behavior. 

Bandai-Namco S.H.Figurearts body-kuns—movable figures used for drawing—appear in a sparing number of the sculptures. “The figures felt like a risk, which was good,” Robinson notes in the exhibition text. Both are true. They strip the work of the softness that the artist is such a master at achieving (see Room With Painted Walls and Ceiling). In exchange, we receive a locked-in sense of scale. This makes for less ambiguous, equally quiet, and more dread-filled encounters than one is accustomed to having with his work. 

It’s clear who comes out the winner in Robinson’s games, but you’ll be awfully glad you played. 

“Rooms With Rooms and Games”
Through 12/21: Sat noon-5 PM or by appointment, [email protected], Devening Projects, 3039 W. Carroll, deveningprojects.com/exhibitions/rooms-with-rooms-with-games