For the uninitiated, it’s a bit of a mindfuck- it’s hard to wrap your head around exactly how Hunter College owns and allows their students to use a space quite like their Times Square Gallery, but think somewhere between a mental ward and a bat cave in terms of square footage and ambience. It’s harder still to understand why Virginia Beach-based Derraindrop chose to use only three out of the dozen or so large, lofted white rooms in the gallery space to fill with art for their exhibit entitled The Disappearance of Tal Ben-Yacco. That said, perhaps the art collective hadn’t been planning on that kind of legroom. We missed the opening performances, but their tightly designed, prominent exhibition was a multimedia installation piece that centered around cardboard boxes hanging from the ceiling that, upon closer inspection, contained speakers and inexplicable buttons within them. It took a minute to even figure out how to turn the thing on, but as fractals and neon geometry dashed against the walls from video projectors, some seriously phased nonsense issued forth from the little cardboard box that just minutes before weren’t budging an inch. You found the on switch.
