"Walking into Roger Hiorns’ installation at Marc Foxx, one feels a bit like a giant, or a god, or perhaps just a passenger in an airplane. On the floor in the center of the room is a barren wasteland of an island, textured like a miniature lunar landscape. The untitled work, which Hiorns has been reprising in various venues since 2008, is eerily compelling in its simplicity, beckoning one to circumnavigate its irregular edges and engendering a sense of wonder at how it came to be there. Is it an abstraction à la the latex spills of Lynda Benglis? Or did it simply seep up through the concrete floor?

Closer inspection reveals that the piece is composed entirely of sand in a spectrum of grays and blacks. And the sand, as it turns out, is actually the remains of a pulverized passenger aircraft engine. An agent of power and flight is literally grounded.

The piece’s peripatetic nature means that eventually it must be swept up and carted off to its next incarnation. But the dust particles are so tiny, it’s easy to see how a few might get left behind. They will be blown about, perhaps even inhaled, becoming a tiny part of every place the work has been."

-Sharon Mizota