This group exhibition featured work by Esopus 13 contributors Jeff Gibson, Oliver Herring, Peter Krashes, Alex Masket, and Mickey Smith.

Multimedia artist Oliver Herring and painter Peter Krashes opened the issue with an artists’ project exploring the connections between their work over the course of their 24 years together. Each spread of the 20-page project consisted of a “conversation” between two artworks—one by each artist—appearing on facing pages. To bring this approach into three dimensions for the exhibition, Oliver created a new video compilation of the improvisational and participatory TASK events he has organized since 2002 in locations around the world, while Peter, a community activist, contributed a painting that referenced a rally he helped to organize in Brooklyn.

Jeff Gibson exhibited four images from his series “Sarsaparilla to Sorcery.” Each work couples appropriated imagery from 20th-century encyclopedias with Gibson’s own abstract photographic images (an approach also explored to great effect in his Encyclopaedia Pareidolia project for Esopus 13). Mickey Smith contributed the large-scale diptych Collocation #6 (EBONY), 2008. The piece is from her acclaimed “Volume” series, which features juxtapositions of monumental photographs of bound periodicals from libraries around the world (the series was also the source of Mickey’s project for the issue).

The exhibition also incorporated several works by Alex Masket, a severely autistic and prodigiously talented 22-year-old whose collages—composed of everything from duct tape to press-on letters—were also featured in Esopus 13. Alex’s Untitled (Black Corner), 2008, which was reproduced on the front and back covers of the issue, was featured along with several of the artist’s collages on paper. This exhibition represented Alex’s New York City debut.