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Garen Novruzyan’s online exhibition, digitally mounted by the artist himself, entitled Water, takes its own flux as it’s grounding element. Much like the element of water, the elements of this work are fluid, yet finite. I can’t ignore that my knowledge of this work comes from viewing it in it’s online setting, but also from a seemingly never ending correspondence between myself and the artist, a drop of which is documented in a piece included in the exhibition, Same AF. Novruzyan’s works, for all their aesthetic and material variance, are bound by their openness to being shaped by the artist’s ever changing surroundings and circumstances. The included documentation of the works situated in the artist’s home, where only the artist and his mother were able to view the works in real space, adds the home as a character to the story. It really is delightful to imagine the home, with all its functional utilities- pipes, sinks, faucets, swirling soaps and items and warm water in a dishwasher or laundry machines, punctuated by the visual grammar of these works. The Neighborhood of Make-Believe includes water itself, bound by the inner edges of a readymade vase. The water sustains a single daisy. A dried orange and a small package addressed to the artist complete the composition. The package, of course, includes the address of the home and points rather directly to the routes and reasons by which the rest of the objects, Novruzyan, and his mother have entered and exited the space over time. A base board in the background of the documentation alerts the viewer to the home’s omnipresence in this work. However, with a simple scroll down, as if a magic trick has taken place, the background is eliminated and a computer generated shadow appears. The work is no longer in the home, although it has not physically traveled. It is now merely in the exhibition, or on the internet, two siteless sites and formless yet formal constructs revealed. The solar system home page of Water follows a similar illogic. The seven works appear together in a space with no horizon, no consistent light source, no certain planes and instead are consistent only in their relativity to each other. David Kordansky package is another such package work in which Novruzyan is situated someplace in between an artist working with the gallery and a consumer making a purchase from the gallery. It illustrates the grey areas in notions of class implicit in art world transactions in which the type of purchase Novruzyan has made, of an autographed artist catalog, positions him as more of a customer than a lauded collector. However, by presenting the object anew, he plays the role of artist. Strawberry Kisses and The Vanishing Sunset mark a return to Novruzyan’s familiar style, marked by a grave reflection on materiality in which the artist’s concerns with ecological sustainability lead him towards both organic and recycled materials for many of his wallworks and sculptures. These same concerns are present in Mmm Hmm, an example of the sort of black box I was referencing in Same AF. Novruzyan’s nod to minimalist sculpture is made fresh with the artist’s apparent sense of urgency for addressing his most sincere concerns. The black box idea, to reiterate, is that “u don’t really have to understand what’s inside the box to use the box.” In Water, Novruzyan goes beyond the inside and outside of the proverbial box and instead uses the boxes, as well as a number of other domestic characters to write a contemporary visual fable for the post Stay at Home moment.