12 Theses / Dec 14th / 7-10pm

Width: 700px; gallery

Width: 700px;

While the structure of the gallery is virtually limitless in the boundary-less  non-physically governed realm of cyberspace, Width: 700px; Gallery chooses the ubiquitous white cube as its form. Not only does it take on that familiar gallery format, every “room” in each show is just a template. The colors the walls are painted may vary; works may appear hung on the “wall” or as sculpture on the “floor” or “pedestals.” Even the first frame, the front desk, is cast from the same mold with just a post it note which expands to a description of the show before you enter.

When a gallery can be so much more flexible with space online, why settle for the same structure we have seen over and over? It could be the same reason that new galleries choose to revert to a familiar format rather than trying something new: the white cube is safe. It is comfortable and well known. Perhaps, on the other hand, the lo-res pixelated reflection of the art world is a lighthearted critique of the institution, a reduction of the space and a teasing at an aesthetic associated with huge sums of cultural and monetary capital. In a world where the newcomers are tech-savvy and the upper crust of the art world takes tremendous strength to grab a foothold in, it makes sense that counterculture and the underdogs will do what they have always done: satire and attempt to subvert the world from which they are still excluded.

The white cube of Width: 700px;, curated and created by Levi Bruce, is a chance to pretend, a fantasy, and a rebellion all rolled into one. It surpasses the conventional gallery in its ability to show digital-only work, which real world galleries are still trying to figure out. In the new gallery, a .gif may be housed in an ornate goldleaf frame, an icon from a well known program may sit on the floor, poised in perfect non-space, pretending to exist in more than two dimensions.

            How the gallery goers access the space is different, too. Instead of keeping an eye out in journals or receiving postcards, the viewer of this exhibit is invited on Facebook. A link to the show is published on opening night. Maybe followers of past shows will see the new work on their feed, as the gallery is after all, merely a tumblr. Perhaps the viewer has instead followed an entire arc of links, looking at the featured artist of the curator. Yes, it does seem a quite a bit less glamorous than the cocktail parties of yesteryear, but how many visitors from Mozambique, Korea, or Greece for example would have come to a localized opening? I can venture a significantly smaller number.

            Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, the last exhibiting artist, seems like a natural fit in this gallery. A PhD student at University of Texas, Austin, his work in the exhibition continues on his own practice of distorting the space in the gallery through mirrors, clone stamp .gifs of established gallery spaces, frames, and windows. "Tibayan generates work that both deconstructs and caters to the specific environment in which it might be showcased. Both contextually and visually, the artwork is made as a reaction to the gallery, suggesting the confinement and rigidity of traditional exhibition space."

            While the exhibition space is incredibly exciting, and I appreciate its play on the rather annoyingly consistent structure the art world tends to fall on, I also find myself wishing in the same breath that it would take it to the next level, whatever that level might look like.

Links:

 700 gallery

 Sherwin Rivera Tibayan

CALENDAR

Studio Nudes

Nick Johnson

Document (Oct. 25 - Dec. 7)

845 Washington, Chicago, IL.

THE .PSD SHOW

click to download composite .psd file of images from contributer websites

To Elijah

Elijah Burgher
Friendship as a way of life b/w I’m seeking the Minotaur
Western Exhibitions: October 26 - Dec 7 
845 Washington, Chicago, IL. 

kurt hentschlager // < a href=" response

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NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP

NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP at Heaven Gallery

Gwynne Johnson, Jessica Bardsley, Ashley Thomas

October 18^th, 2013

Gwynne Johnson

Somewhere Beyond Myself I Wait For My Arrival, 2013

The viewer crosses the gallery room, atop the scuffed and splintered wooden floor, beneath the coffered ceiling to confront the white walls, refaced in spite of the old pipelines in odd corners of the space.  The floor is one you would never want to touch, the gallery is made into a creepy place in light of the work—one may really only feel safe looking at the work illuminated by a familiar track lighting situation.  An SAIC media center projector sits atop a dirtied (once white) pedestal, its cord taped crudely to the floor.

One is confronted with Ashley Thomas’ graphite drawing Flowers upon entering the main room of the gallery. The page is filled with gray charcoal.  The charcoal reflects the lighting overhead to reveal a curvature in the installation of the drawing, tacked into the wall by copper nails. The drawing of a vase of flowers appears as a study defined by negative space.  We are given access to the entire paper, and the piece immediately conjures memories of attempting studies from life in a beginning drawing course.  One can picture the artist with a gray-dusted hand rubbing out the highlights with a kneaded eraser.

The image's darkness and shape of the black and white study is mimicked in the shiny black acrylic frame of the nearby hanging Untitled found-image collages.  The frame looks to be unevenly poured resin and has a wavy, shiny surface.  Two black and white printed bouquets stand next to each other against a paint-blackened background, the glossy brush stokes of which are visible in the reflected light.  The clippings appear as studies as well, existing in appropriate size to an encyclopedic reference image.  These three bouquets are de-romanticized , and are presented more as anatomy illustrations that emphasize the floral arrangement.

Attention is moved to the dirtied projector’s occupation of space and its projected video by Jessica Bardsley.  The 16mm film A Past of Plank and Nail moves through a still home and its still life moments, appearing as a record of the space.  The house is Emily Dickinson’s, now a museum that portrays the absence of its inhabitants.  The residual objects evoke a presence, or perhaps a soul that Emily Dickinson speaks of in a poem referenced in the title of Bardsley's work:

The Props assist the House (729)

By Emily Dickinson

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter –

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life –

A Past of Plank and Nail

And slowness – then the scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul –

One comes away with images of the video study like the fireplace and its mantle, the white dress floating in the room, and the cracked toile-covered wall.

These images are carried into the next room of the gallery, across the cracked wood floor, and referenced in viewing the work the viewer finds there.  A row of matte-black square images hang in succession and pull the eye toward their luminous lunar subjects.  Gwynne Johnson's series Milk Moons charts lunar phases in human breast milk, with a matte black abyss of the background akin to the surface of Thomas’ graphite drawings.  A close inspection reveals a surface that looks like finely crushed obsidian, and perhaps calls attention to the mineral nature of the milk.  The photographs are hung frame to frame in a linear fashion, yet some fall slightly out of the arrangement and a bit off kilter.  Though unsubstantiated by intent, the display leads to the subjective sneaking through an attempt at objectivity, the study made personal.

Once again looking around the room, the eyes turn to a grand piano covered in a black tarp, pushed aside toward the window in the gallery.  Night Without Sleep seems to request a solitary viewer, alone in the gallery.  The lighting begs to be dimmed and dramatized, the piano an f-sharp minor scale, and a small spotlight on the white-washed pipes in the corner of the room. 

[History] Under Construction
Kayla Anderson, Slaveya Minkova, Emma Robbins
Gallery X
1
Late 20th Century. Bulgaria.
Girl bundles
 red cloth archeology

Still from Archolapse (Video) by Slaveya Minkova

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Storm Pattern Rug IV
Navajo
Early 20th Century
genuine antique navajo rug, bleached flour


10/25/2013
Specimens from the 1333 N. Campbell Home. Various specimens preserved. 
The objects displayed have been recovered from a residential home in and of Chicago in early 21st century

afterthoughts on Hito Steyerl

“Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground.” (Hito Steyerl)

This is a weird idea that Hito Steyerl proposes. If there is no ground to fall toward, there is no sense of falling, and as such, as Steyerl proposes  “it could initiate a sensation of stasis.

Or, the void. Black holes. Vertigo.  This thought took me instantly to the Existential Void and the “malaise of existence.” It reminds me of dreams of free fall that are supposedly the mind’s symbolic way of alerting to a life situation that has grown out of control or things going downhill quickly. Furthermore, she suggests, that while one is falling, there is this feeling of “floating, or not moving at all,” brief moment of disorientation before on catches sight of what one is falling toward.

Steyerl claims that  “disorientation” happens “partly due to the loss of a stable horizon,” that is an idea I find very intruiging. In particular, the creation of an “artifical stable horizon.” A thought provoking claim is made here by Steyerl who relates the emergence of tools like …the sextant that allowed sailors to calculate the exact position to  “colonialism and the spread of a capitalist global market”. I was first reminded of Nietzsche, who writes in his essay Who killed God?, “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? …… Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time?”

The problem with linear perspective is, according to Steyerl, typically disregarded. The horizon is conceived as an abstract flat line upon which the points on any horizontal plane converge.

The vertical perspective, or the lack of lines coalescing into a horizontal line reminded me of photographs by Benny Lam, which are labeled with a QR code which opens up to a petition to the Hong Kong government for better living conditions for the lower and middle-lower income residents of Hong Kong.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertypicturegalleries/9888398/Overhead-photos-of-cramped-apartments-in-Hong-Kong.html

According to Steyerl, ‘the perspective from above establishes an imaginary floating observer and an imaginary stable ground, which for her creates a visual “normality – a new subjectivity that is folded into surveillance technology and screen-based distraction”

This brings to mind images that one has seen by drones, like the Gorgon Stare, that has spherical array of nine cameras attached to it, which allow the viewer to observe 12 different perspectives at any time.

For Steyerl “montage becomes a perfect device for destabilizing the observers’ perspective and breaking down linear time.”

She points to the film “Enter the Void” by Gaspar Noé: A gaze that penetrates space from the perspective of a disembodied point of view as it travels rapidly from past to present in continuous blur and rapid velocity. The sense of verticality is amplified by aerial shots from bird’s eye view and sense of gravity is lost by the camera’s frequent rotation. Most perspectives are shot from bird’s eye view as the camera travels through buildings, walls, and corridors.  

Steyerl poses interesting questions here, such as “do these tropes, allegorized in a single  (and frankly, god-awful) movie be expanded into a more general analysis of disembodies hovering point of views? Moreover, “ do the aerial views, drone perspectives, and 3-D dives into abysses stand in for the gazes of “dead white males,” a worldview that lost its vitality, yet persist as an undead but powerful tool to police the world and control its own reproductions?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJkPLYmUyzg