Ed Atkins’s New Work Shows that His Real Medium Might Be Poetry

Ed Atkins: Refuse, 2019, two-channel realtime 3D simulation; at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.
After seeing some gripping performative poetry readings by Ed Atkins, I walked into “I like spit now,” his latest exhibition at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, hoping to see something other than the CGI works for which he is best known. While Atkins’s videos play with the dissonance between the very human scenes they depict and their hyperreal computerized rendering, their most strik