Those walking into the Zilkha Gallery in recent days expecting a neat row of oil paintings lining the walls may be in for a surprise. The “Connectivity Lost” exhibition that began this Saturday at Zilkha and will run until Dec. 6, certainly has its share of canvases—ominous cel-shades of suburban sprawl on meteoroids floating and dripping into the void—a majority of the works on display eschew conventional presentation for a conceptual, almost Dadaist array of mediums: wall painting, staged photography, video clips and antique-style china all coexist in an uneasy equilibrium.

Indeed, the only thing linking these disparate works is the theme of “Connectivity Lost” in the show’s title: the disconnect, loneliness and nascent hostility at the heart of modern’s man relations with the world around him. The works on display all have an undercurrent of sadness or anger towards the trends of globalization and technological disconnect, but in their diversity of media comes a wide range of specific targets and strategies employed.

A clinical reading of “The Whiteness of the Whale” from Moby Dick soundtracks a video of a beluga whale making runs in a bare, claustrophobic aquarium, juxtaposing the awe and grandeur of Melville’s leviathan with the banality and septic conditions that this other “white whale” has been imprisoned in. On a wall around the corner are the vaguely Californian silhouettes of electrical towers, awkwardly disguised as palm trees, a bitterly funny commentary on the measures taken to disguise the industrial as arboreal. Meanwhile a few feet away are desperate Craigslist quotes written on almost calligraphic depictions of motels and gas stations, a stark representation of futile attempts to find warmth online where none was able to last in the real world.
The abovementioned works stand out, but virtually every piece contributed to “Connectivity Lost” resonates at some level. None of the pieces are “pretty” in the conventional sense, but that’s not the point. Jackson Pollock talked about how art must address the problems and fears of its time, and the daringly unconventional works at the Zilkha Gallery right now go the distance towards confronting the alienation of modern society.