Balancing Act: The User-Friendly Industriart of Marman and Borins at Cristin Tierney Gallery in NYC

Visible from the street in the ground floor gallery space – like prismatic fish in a floor-to-ceiling aquarium – Marman and Borins’ extra-large classic arcade game is arresting, friendly, and dare I say, beautiful, even. It’s not like the crass flashy casino crane games that vaguely tempt us with plush stuffed animals or Swiss watch prizes, but instead offers gallery goers the opportunity to build “endlessly reconfigurable” compositions from basic forms. Audience intention and participation are key components to this effort. It effectively gives them fundamental control to create and build rather than accept consumer narratives spun by corporate leaders who simply want to sell stuff. To me, that’s huge. And it’s done in such a playful, inviting, spoonful-of-sugar manner that those lessons go down and are learned easily in experience.