Jason Loebs, Private Matters, installation view, Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York, 2017.
In Private Matters at Essex Street, Jason Loebs took on the issue of eminent domain. The artist filmed three separate sites of government land seizure for the purposes of corporatized development, including the nearby megaproject under way at Essex Crossing; the resulting smartphone footage was shown on three elegantly assembled AV setups on low pedestals. Realtime recording of the playback by another phone (notably in each case the "source" phone is a Samsung while the secondary "feeder" is an iPhone; two different makes corresponding to distinct proprietary controls in their settings) was projected onto the walls at relatively close range. This light stream, ostensibly the vehicle of the work's content, polluted the immediate optical field, so that the "feeder" camera struggled to calibrate its mark. The resulting video image was poetically displaced and refracted through a chain of reframings, a metaphor for the destabilization of the commons under neoliberalism.
— Liz Hirsch, Artnews, summer 2017, pp. 121–122.
Jason Loebs, Private Matters, installation view, Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York, 2017.
Jason Loebs, TITLE STACK SINK RELEASE, installation view, Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland, 2014.
For this work, the casings of five MacBook batteries, mounted flush against the gallery wall, have each been delicately marked by fingertips dipped in anti-counterfeit security ink. If touch serves as a medium for transference between a latent or concealed world and the material restrictions of our own, Loebs's modest sculptures indicate the increasing reliance of human cognition and its attendant faculties (memory, communication, self-expression) on beautifully abstract machinery (represented here by sleek modernist outward form rather than complex internal circuitry). Further, they hint at the drive for personalized data-protection that requires two-way recognition for effective operation. By now, the question is not who is in love with her optimized operating system, but rather, who isn't—for all the libertarian sentiment of Silicon Valley, its one-size-fits-most service provision is rather weirdly communitarian. The individuation of private, hand-held mediating devices (your thumbprint, your messages, your photos, your iPhone) cleverly conceals the great standardization of contemporary experience. If veneration of the Virgin can be considered démodé on a broad cultural scale, Loebs' discharged batteries shift emphasis from the problem of mere salvation to immemorial preservation (and indeed, controlled representation) of the uniquely networked self—now dependent on consistent electricity rather than human conviction.
— Kari Rittenbach, Images without images, in Descartes' Daughter, ed. Piper Marshall, New York: Swiss Institute, 2014.