Nick Cave – Recent Soundsuits
January 8th – February 7th
Jack Shainman Gallery
It’s important to see Nick Cave’s work with the expectation that you will not be able to make sense out of anything you see; but see it anyway. Insane clusters of jumbled branches fitted with items like the ceramic birds, fake flowers, or tops in every shape and size, surround the heads of garden gnome-like African American figurines and heavily patterned, fabric clad mannequins. More mannequins in various contraposto stances, don bright, one piece outfits with large head enclosures that project upward and are made of material that is either shaggy, bejeweled or knitted together like a collection of macramé tea cozies in clashing designs.
The overwhelming submersion in kitsch and craft makes these Soundsuits very entertaining. Like fairytale monsters, there is something dark in the playfulness of them; their covered faces and frozen bodies send fun house shivers down the spine. Trying to find a deeper pattern in the patterns, however, is a lot trickier. There seems to be an effort to address the history of slavery in America through various imagery (especially in a side room that has little in common with the rest of the show) but it’s impossible to sort through all the clutter of decoration and arbitrary juxtapositions to come to a solid conclusion about what Cave might be trying to say. It tastes like a half-baked attempt to give the work more political credibility when it doesn’t need it. The spectacle is enough.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Eternal Photographs
Hiroshi Sugimoto: 7 Days/7Nights
Gagosian Gallery
November 6, 2008-Saturday February 14, 2009
Trying to make time into a visual experience is tricky because it isn’t something we usually visualize in ways that aren’t symbolic. So how do you make something about time that isn’t overly symbolic and isn’t over the top kitsch? That is exactly the question Hiroshi Sugimoto answers with his series of Seascapes in 7days/7Nights. The vastness of both the idea of time and the content of each photograph is exactly what works about these large silver-gelatin prints.
The exhibition, designed by Sugimoto himself, is made up of two rooms: the front room is a bright, sun-drenched space with a high, sky lighted ceiling and the back is pitch black and sparingly lit. In each room the long back wall holds seven of the massive Seascapes placed evenly next to each other in succession. Each is a misty morning or night of sea and sky that runs out of the frame and in toward the middle horizon at the same time. Everything about these photographs is silent. Not a sound comes out of them or can be heard around them. They absorb the moment like a sponge.
The back room is utterly iconic and yet reveals the cheap parlor trick that photography is. It’s part magic and part hoax, part insight and part visual game. The track light above projects a concentrated beam onto seven dark, large scale photographs surrounded by a white background. The room is completely black and the white seems to radiate light like an intense aura around an icon. But, if you get too close to the photographs it’s easy to see how fragile the illusion really is. The white margins of reflected light only work from a distance and once you walk up to examine them the illusion is quickly revealed and the world returns to normal.
These are photographs in which time has stopped and yet nothing has ended or begun within them. Only slowly and in no particular order does the horizon make itself out between sea and sky. Most of the time it is too misty to find the exact point they differentiate from each other; an easy metaphor for time itself. Each moment fades into the next generally without much definition. It is endless, like the sky and the sea. The simplicity of this idea is refreshing and scary. It’s nice that in a world where so much is complex that this one thing could be so easy to grasp, but the fear of the unknown always lurks over the horizon.
Gagosian Gallery
November 6, 2008-Saturday February 14, 2009
Trying to make time into a visual experience is tricky because it isn’t something we usually visualize in ways that aren’t symbolic. So how do you make something about time that isn’t overly symbolic and isn’t over the top kitsch? That is exactly the question Hiroshi Sugimoto answers with his series of Seascapes in 7days/7Nights. The vastness of both the idea of time and the content of each photograph is exactly what works about these large silver-gelatin prints.
The exhibition, designed by Sugimoto himself, is made up of two rooms: the front room is a bright, sun-drenched space with a high, sky lighted ceiling and the back is pitch black and sparingly lit. In each room the long back wall holds seven of the massive Seascapes placed evenly next to each other in succession. Each is a misty morning or night of sea and sky that runs out of the frame and in toward the middle horizon at the same time. Everything about these photographs is silent. Not a sound comes out of them or can be heard around them. They absorb the moment like a sponge.
The back room is utterly iconic and yet reveals the cheap parlor trick that photography is. It’s part magic and part hoax, part insight and part visual game. The track light above projects a concentrated beam onto seven dark, large scale photographs surrounded by a white background. The room is completely black and the white seems to radiate light like an intense aura around an icon. But, if you get too close to the photographs it’s easy to see how fragile the illusion really is. The white margins of reflected light only work from a distance and once you walk up to examine them the illusion is quickly revealed and the world returns to normal.
These are photographs in which time has stopped and yet nothing has ended or begun within them. Only slowly and in no particular order does the horizon make itself out between sea and sky. Most of the time it is too misty to find the exact point they differentiate from each other; an easy metaphor for time itself. Each moment fades into the next generally without much definition. It is endless, like the sky and the sea. The simplicity of this idea is refreshing and scary. It’s nice that in a world where so much is complex that this one thing could be so easy to grasp, but the fear of the unknown always lurks over the horizon.
The Magic of Peter Callesen
Peter Callesen – Folded Thoughts – Perry Rubenstein Gallery
December 11, 2008 – January 17, 2009
There is something uniquely whimsical about Peter Callensen’s paper cut outs. By uniquely, I mean unique to the loud, ultra modern, and primarily abstract vibe of the Chelsea gallery district. Even the art that creates a quieter atmosphere is generally bogged down in obtrusively demanding theoretical noise. Not the work of Callensen. Walking into the Perry Rubenstein gallery is almost like walking into a library. There is an air of reverence and appreciation, the kind that can’t help but accompany a manifestation of simplicity that does not tax a person’s mental presence, and instead invites it.
If there is a theme to Callesen’s work it is the relationship between positive and negative space. Each of the constructions is a dialog between a sheet of paper and the space that has been removed from it. The cut out portions of the paper make a positive image and the constructions from these cut out portions make a three dimensional image that has some sort of direct relationship with the negative space it is composed of. The gallery is filled with these intricately detailed forms under titles like fall (2008), a constructed skeleton lying as if ejected from a tree composed of negative space and, human ruin (2008), the intricate miniature of the ruins of a castle in the shape of a human body. While the forms are always easily recognizable, it is the consistency of the relationships between positive and negative space, or between constructed and subtracted space, that is rewardingly congruent. These are big ideas: life and death, history and existence, built and taken away; that aren’t generally easy to address in way that always makes visual sense. Some how Callesen does it though, with a childish sincerity that tugs at the heart strings and quickens the mind. It is a reminder that art can be complicated with out being complex and that beauty only exists when it is half present and half imagined.
December 11, 2008 – January 17, 2009
There is something uniquely whimsical about Peter Callensen’s paper cut outs. By uniquely, I mean unique to the loud, ultra modern, and primarily abstract vibe of the Chelsea gallery district. Even the art that creates a quieter atmosphere is generally bogged down in obtrusively demanding theoretical noise. Not the work of Callensen. Walking into the Perry Rubenstein gallery is almost like walking into a library. There is an air of reverence and appreciation, the kind that can’t help but accompany a manifestation of simplicity that does not tax a person’s mental presence, and instead invites it.
If there is a theme to Callesen’s work it is the relationship between positive and negative space. Each of the constructions is a dialog between a sheet of paper and the space that has been removed from it. The cut out portions of the paper make a positive image and the constructions from these cut out portions make a three dimensional image that has some sort of direct relationship with the negative space it is composed of. The gallery is filled with these intricately detailed forms under titles like fall (2008), a constructed skeleton lying as if ejected from a tree composed of negative space and, human ruin (2008), the intricate miniature of the ruins of a castle in the shape of a human body. While the forms are always easily recognizable, it is the consistency of the relationships between positive and negative space, or between constructed and subtracted space, that is rewardingly congruent. These are big ideas: life and death, history and existence, built and taken away; that aren’t generally easy to address in way that always makes visual sense. Some how Callesen does it though, with a childish sincerity that tugs at the heart strings and quickens the mind. It is a reminder that art can be complicated with out being complex and that beauty only exists when it is half present and half imagined.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
