take that Middle America

This show consists of torn fragments of photos the artist took of a 4th of July Parade.  A curator explains: “The torn object is to some extent constantly eluding meaning. […] The reader in turn feels torn: between different hypothetical readings, between different attempts to restore what may have been hidden from him.” In the end, these fragments “are evidence of _____’s continuing attraction, observable in his earliest work, to fractures, lacunae, faults, scratches and all kinds of other forms of damage, whether deliberate or accidental. […] He has endowed them with a symbolic power superior to any approximation of a whole that is by definition impossible and mendacious – the whole of photography, of the event that it has recorded, of the history that it commemorates.”

so close…

I saw this show yesterday, and it’s stunning. Lyrical, melancholy, exquisitely made. The press release did accurately make note of the work’s relationship to cinema, particularly in its framing and masterful manipulation of light. Everything was going fine and then this happened:

“In between the lines, this exhibition wants to talk about how we stage our surroundings, and how these surroundings become the inept scenery of both festive and tragic moments, of recurring home rituals or mental wandering.”

public/private dichotomy finally resolved by art

“[the exhibition] clearly emerges through the lens of the artist’s singular life and is activated through the machinations of the artist’s subconscious and the performance of making. [The artist] opens up the very personal in a bid to reach out to a more collective and shared experience.”

Ed. note: This work is notable in that the artist, an individual with experiences, leveraged same to physically make actual work which other people can see, in public. This is rarely successfully attempted.

human condition explained

“These new, massively extended block works use an architectonic language of stacking, propping and cantilever to suggest a tension which is indicative of our urban-bound human condition”

metaphorical because i say so

“a net, knotted from coarse black rope, slumps on the floor of the gallery like cast-off stockings. It is gravitationally anchored by a hefty rectangle of smoky glass that recasts the net’s bulbous curves in flattened form––a perceptual twist that flicks off and on with switchlike precision depending on the viewer’s position. This is a gorgeous metaphor for the allure of abstraction and its role in the manipulation of desire.”