new works | troika

max goelitz is pleased to present new works from recent series by Troika that explore the interplay between analog and digital realities. In the paintings from the new series To Find What You Are Not Looking For, Troika draws on historical landscape photographs originally used for the documentation and surveying of territories. Troika translates these images into a painterly process based on the Gabor wavelet transformation — a mathematical filter function that breaks images down into wave-like patterns, lines, and textures, used in image analysis, signal processing, and iris recognition.

In the further new series Arrivals without Coordinates, Troika combines historical photographic techniques with questions of ecology, spatial orientation, and technologically generated imagery. The works draw on early hand-coloring techniques in which black-and-white photographs were enhanced with transparent layers of color. In Troika’s practice, this process is interwoven with generative image-making, cartographic references, and analog source material.

The series presents plants situated in landscapes and climate zones to which they cannot be geographically assigned with certainty. Each plant appears as an autonomous presence, detached from fixed coordinates and familiar systems of origin, location, and habitat. Their appearance seems at once plausible and improbable, contemporary and speculative.

In doing so, Troika engages with the historical relationship between photography, cartography, and spatial control. Coordinates are often regarded as neutral tools of orientation, yet their history is deeply entangled with surveying, colonialism, extraction, and administration.

Troika
new works
11 June – 25 July

In parallel, James Turrell’s Elliptical Glass First Cause remains on view through 25 July.