This site-specific installation by artist Bryan Nash Gill (1961–2013) was the final exhibition at Esopus Space. It consisted of two elements: a 122-square-foot woodcut print with applied monoprint that completely covered the north wall of the gallery; and, on the opposite wall, one of the woodblocks used to create the print. Bryan conceived of the piece after attending an opening at Esopus Space, where he noticed the gallery’s OSB particle-board flooring. As he put it, “I am easily mesmerized by the natural patterning of wood, and I had never seen a subflooring used as a finish flooring. I wanted to foreground it even further by creating a one-to-one relationship between the horizontal space of the floor and the vertical space of the wall.”

After carving four woodblocks and four Plexiglas stamps with patterns inspired by those of the pressed-wood floor, Bryan printed all nine segments of the eight-color print at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT. Each of these segments was affixed to the gallery’s north wall with screws whose positions mirrored those attaching the OSB panels to the concrete gallery subfloor below. On the south wall of the gallery, Gill mounted one of the woodblocks from the series, which he carved by hand from a piece of OSB board. Like much of Bryan’s other work, What Was Will Be Again didn’t just bridge the gaps between abstraction and representation, object and subject—it effectively closed them.

The piece directly correlates with an eponymous project the artist created for Esopus 18 (2012), which was launched jointly at an artist’s reception on May 2, 2012. The title of the exhibition and project references the fact that Esopus Space, which staged 18 exhibitions and more than 30 events in three years, officially closed when Bryan’s show concluded.