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Sunday, November 3, 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
kurt hentschlager // < a href=" response
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NIGHT WITHOUT SLEEP
NIGHT
WITHOUT SLEEP at
Gwynne
Johnson, Jessica Bardsley, Ashley Thomas
October
18th, 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.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
[History] Under Construction
Kayla Anderson, Slaveya Minkova, Emma Robbins
Gallery X
1
Late 20th Century. Bulgaria.
Girl bundles
red cloth archeology
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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
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
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
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.
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?
Versions
I think ignorance of copyright and art market debate is
beneficial to my health and happiness.
I don’t see any necessity in
producing images myself — everything that I would need exists, it’s just about
finding it.” Is the artist as creator a thing of the past?
Some of my favorite exhibitions don’t make clear
distinctions between those fields, incorporating works by journalists,
architects, musicians, etc. I think it is a more interesting strategy to curate
works, instead of being involved in a scene or a CV
(Oliver
Laric)
In
the landscape of contemporary art, I find Oliver Laric’s work most compelling
right now because he makes visible what often goes unnoticed: the borrowed
image or gesture. Luis Borges once claimed that translations produce new works.
Oliver Laric’s work very much reflects this idea. He uses existing images to
create new images, whereby the destruction of one image creates another image,
just as with iconoclasm.
“If
you are looking for a brilliant statement on the visual culture of the Internet
age, or an in-depth analysis of its historical roots in Western culture, I
couldn’t suggest anything better.” Laric’s Versions are a two-channel video, a
series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a novel, a
recipe a play, a dance routine, a feature film and a merchandise.
It challenges
current modes of creative production and the hierarchies of an “authentic,” or
original image. It dismisses the idea of the original and suggests a new look at
image making, one in which pirate copies and appropriations gradually replace
the original in a digitized aged.
Laric
uses found material from places like youtube, Flickr, Google, 4chan,
3Dwarehouse and fuses high and low art images with philosophy and critical
theory.
Laric
takes the idea of deinstitutionalization of an artwork the whole way in his
project Biennale Online 2013, which
is an incomplete, partially outlined timeline of online exhibitions between the
years 1991 and 2013. This, naturally, is
not an authoritative history of an online exhibition but rather Laric’s very
own reiteration of ahistorical propositions. Laric consulted with artists and
curators as, for instance, the New Museum’s Curator Lauren Cornell, who has herself
started a research project
that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue,
called Open Curating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or
physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive
context.
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