Olaf Brzeski, Hunter's Fiancee, 2006. Ceramics, wood, spray enamel

Bean Gilsdorf: You work with a lot of ethereal, evocative forms: smoke, destroyed objects, things that seem uncanny…

Olaf Brzeski: Uncanny is a good word, yeah.

BG: Tell me about that. What are your feelings toward these objects?

OB: To explain how I feel you need to know that I was born in the south of Poland, in Wroclaw. This city has a complicated history because it’s very near the border and it changed owners: Czech, Polish, then German, now it’s Polish again. Before the war it was a German city, and after WWII the borders were changed and [Poland] got it. The atmosphere there, the architecture of bunkers and tunnels, there’s a constant presence of the fear of war, even in dreams. In my childhood it was so present—my grandparents’ stories, on the television, in propaganda—I didn’t just put that away. So now I use it. Some of my work comes from this kind of sinister premonition of what might happen.

BG: Like the video installed at the Casino [one venue of the exhibition Tarnow: 1000 years of modernity].

OB: Yes, In Memory of Major Josef Moneta.

Olaf Brzeski, In Memory of Major Josef Moneta, 2008. Installation with video and plaque

BG: That work also has an anxiety to it. The visuals are sinister, as you say, and the sound heightens that. How did you come to make this work?

OB: This piece functions as a discovery. There’s the movie, which I made to look like found footage, and there’s a marble plaque attached to the wall with a porcelain medallion, it’s a piece of gravestone. So these two pieces are really like discoveries.

BG: And what is the video about?

OB: The whole situation is taking place in a partisan’s camp in December 1939, just after the war began. And this small group of soldiers is hiding and their leader, Major Josef Moneta, he’s kind of a myth, a legendary person. His face is deformed; he’s monstrous, but he’s also a kind of superhero. In America you have your superheroes and we here in Poland are watching and copying that. And I wanted to create our own Polish superhero, but acting on the border of good and evil. On one side he’s this leader, an officer, but he is scary. His acts are scary, but definitely he is a force, and in bad times his strength will come and save us. He is a savior, but it’s not clear.

BG: It’s a borderline, an ambiguity.

OB: Exactly.

BG: In Memory is not site specific, but a lot of your work is, yes?

OB: Yes, I prefer to work that way. But I like to work site specifically in a way that it looks like it’s real, like it was there for years, that it’s supposed to be there. I really like to work with museums and places with history and a context. The Casino is also quite good for that. I don’t like white cube space.

Olaf Brzeski, A Crash on the Museum Stairs, 2009. Mixed media installation

BG: So you build on the history that’s already there, accentuate it or bring it forward in some way?

OB:  I don’t want the work to be rootless. I make up stories, fictions, and these are the roots of the work. It’s like gossip, you say the words to others and the story begins.

BG: Your work is like science fiction, surreal, a parallel reality.

OB: Yes, I think about making a gap, searching for a gap that you can’t pass over, or name, or categorize. Maybe surreal is an overused term.

BG: Making a gap or finding a gap? Because they are different.

OB: In my case, making a gap. Finding a gap…it sounds more real, because reality is full of gaps. But I don’t find them, I make them, and then I name them. I make stories, to attach roots to the artwork, but I don’t want it to be part of reality. It’s a stretched possibility.

BG: Do you feel that you are a Polish artist specifically? Would you put yourself in a geographical category?

OB: I don’t ever think about it.

BG: But if I asked you…

OB: I don’t know. There is something Polish in this kind of thinking. For example, the uniforms in the movie, or just the atmosphere, but…I don’t know. I went to an exhibition and all the journalists were asking about Communism, that’s what they were interested in, like: How do you feel now, how do you work as an artist? You had this Communist past, are you released from it or does it still have an impact on you?

Olaf Brzeski, Dream - Spontaneous Combustion, 2008. Resin and soot installation

BG: And what was your answer?

OB: No, completely not, I don’t care about that! It doesn’t have any influence on me. I was born in ’75 and my consciousness was forming at the end of Communism, and apart from a couple of details I don’t give a damn about it. Completely. War is more present, more specific. Especially when you grow up in an old German city with this sinister atmosphere. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced anything like that…

BG: Well, I’ve been to Berlin and seen the old buildings with bullet holes, pockmarked from shelling…

OB: Yes, Wroclaw is full of these remains. But I mean this whole empire, this architecture: that simple, strong, monumental style of that time. Nazi style. There’s a lot of it and it creates this atmosphere of fear. So Wroclaw doesn’t feel like home. I was born there but it doesn’t feel like home. My friends and I admire the city, it’s well planned and green, it’s very easy to live there. But it doesn’t feel like home.

Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 1 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 1, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print on aluminum panel (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24" & Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 2 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 2, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24"

2012 has arrived and it can mean only one thing: the apocalypse. Will the End Times be ushered in by the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar reaching its end date? We can’t be sure until late December! What has become painfully certain, however, is that we are in an election year. And, while the economy looms large on the minds of most Americans, immigration is not far behind. Will America eventually choose a candidate who would grant “amnesty” (read: anything resembling legal status or *gasp citizenship!) to the millions of undocumented people living and working in this country, ushering in the likely demise of the U.S.? Or, will we the people elect a man patriotic enough to send all the illegal Cuban, Chinese, Honduran, and Southeast Asian immigrants back to where they came from; namely Mexico? The fate of the country and the soul of freedom hang in the balance!

At least that would seem to be the choice as presented by the Republican candidates during the never-ending cycle of G.O.P. primary debates. The language surrounding immigration, espoused by the candidates as well as other jingoist hardliners, has become so vitriolic and so reduced that hyperbole strategically crowds out any sober dialogue that addresses the complexity of the issue or pathos for the individuals most effected by immigration enforcement.

Bibiana Suárez’s exhibition entitled Memoria (Memory) at the Hyde Park Art Center attempts to catalyze that discussion through playful moderation. Tracing the influence of Latino culture in America, Suárez expresses hope and frustration while eluding anything that would resemble rhetorical bombast. The show is such a disarmingly tempered analysis of themes of Pop culture representations, identity, labor, and the dynamics of integration that it takes all the steam out of this hot button issue.

Bibiana Suárez, Ai pledch aliyens no. 1, 2005-2011, acrylic paint and digital transfer on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

In order to create her large-scale installation of mixed media paintings and ink-jet prints, Suárez borrows the format of the game “Memory” in which players selectively turn over cards placed face down in order to find pairs of matching cards. The gallery walls are filled with one hundred and eight “playing cards” sized 23.5 inches by 23.5 inches with images depicting maps, body parts, historical images, or various phrases in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Text boxes featuring an assortment of inclusive and derogatory names for the Latino Diaspora are meant to depict the “backs” of the playing cards. The game aspect of the installation invites viewers to seek connections within the available images. It also serves as a metaphor for the ever-shifting boundaries of integration within American culture as well as the gamesmanship of the national debate.

Bibiana Suárez, Mariel 1980, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

Certain matches, such as two images titled Yo quiero no. 1/ I Want no. 1 and Yo quiero no. 2/ I Want no. 2 depicting the Chihuahua from mid-90’s Taco Bell ads, have already been made on the north and south facing walls. Not all of these combinations are identical matches, however. Conceptual matches add nuance to the artist’s themes. For example, Negrita tejaricana/ Black Texarican, an image of a brown faced, dark haired girl is matched with Blanquita tejaricana /White Texarican, the same girl with blonde hair and pink skin. Through these types of expanded connections, Suárez is able to shape a broader conversation about innocence and identity.

The exhibition does a good job of cataloging the checkered history of Latino representation throughout American popular culture, from Desi Arnaz and West Side Story to Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito. These elements are presented dispassionately, as things that exist for better or worse. Their influence on how America understands Latino culture, and the message that is being reverberated back to that culture is left up to the viewer to decide. The more urgent aspects of Latino identity are treated in a similar manner. Two black and white images titled Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 1/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 1 and Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 2/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 2 depict burned bodies lying in the remains of a makeshift labor camp. Suárez acknowledges tragedy and suffering as part of the experience of Latinos without expressing any grand political statements about labor, poverty, or social justice. The artist walks a fine line between making political art and utilizing more conceptual archiving strategies adept at bypassing authoritative editorializing.

Bibiana Suárez, Pulmones / Lungs, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

And maybe in the end that is the best course for creating a quiet space for contemplation about a decidedly loaded topic. Rather than strive to assemble an artistic broadside capable of matching the grandiosity of the apocalyptic language that surrounds the immigration debate, Suárez offers viewers a place to reassess and possibly heal. Memoria (Memory) may be a sober show, but it is also hopeful. The match for a piece titled Corazón herido/ Wounded Heart is a panel called Corazón cosido/ Sewn Heart.

Memoria (Memory) will be on view at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL through March 25.

Maurizio Cattelan. "All." Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. November 4, 2011 - January 22, 2012.

People seem to either love or despise Cattelan’s retrospective All, on view through January 22^nd at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Roberta Smith of The New York Times suggests, “[w]hatever their strengths, the individual works are radically decontextualized and diminished in this arrangement.” The arrangement to which Smith refers is the suspension of 128 works – the entirety of Cattelan’s artistic production (apart from two works owners refused to loan) – within Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic open rotunda. Works ranged from giant slabs of carved granite and models of dinosaur skeletons to photographs, canvases and the smallest of sculptures, subtly and unexpectedly placed throughout. Anyone looking at this exhibition cannot deny that – at the very least – it is a feat of engineering genius.

Maurizio Cattelan. "All," 2007. Marble. As installed at the New Museum, New York.

I had previously seen several of the works displayed at the Guggenheim under more “conventional” circumstances. A series of nine Carrara marble sculptures resembling bodies under sheets, All (2007) was displayed almost alone in a gallery at the New Museum for the 2010 exhibition, Skin Fruit. In this context, the work was arresting, a disquieting reflection on the history of needless and anonymous death. A similarly serious tenor surrounds the installation of Ave Maria (2007), a series of three highly realistic saluting arms projecting from the wall, at Tate Modern. Presented amidst a gallery of stunning post-Impressionist paintings and classical marble sculpture, the work functions ambiguously, disrupting our reception of the neighboring works with questions of political violence and hierarchy. Untitled (2009), a taxidermied horse on its side with a wooden sign reading “INRI” protruding from its abdomen, was included in Tate Modern’s Pop Life. In the gallery preceding Cattelan’s piece was Andrea Fraser’s controversial work in which the artist videotapes herself having sex with a collector. To immediately follow this emotionally charged experience with a giant taxidermied horse felt like a delightful respite. I was struck by the work’s humor and absurdity, an ironic play on the illustrious history of the equine in art.

Maurizio Cattelan, Errotin, le vrai lapin (a), 1995. Cibachrome, photograph by Lionel Foumeaux, plexiglass. 33.5 x 23.5 inches. Courtesy of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin.

The unorthodox installation at the Guggenheim affords an entirely unique and site-specific experience of Cattelan’s work, making incredible use of the museum’s architecture. For an artist who touts himself a practitioner of relational aesthetics, the exhibition approach was particularly fitting. One experiences every vantage point of a given work, a perspective untenable with traditional methods of display. I found myself ascending the ramp more slowly than the way I walked through the galleries of the deKooning retrospective the day before at MoMA, intrigued by the unusual juxtapositions that revealed themselves with each step; works that may otherwise have been separated by several rooms could be seen simultaneously across the atrium, allowing the viewer to dictate what comparisons or relationships were most relevant to him or her. The physical distance this installation creates between viewer and work encouraged me to look more closely, perhaps less so at individual works, but again, more at how they related to one another. I was especially pleased by the tongue-in-cheek positioning of small-scale pieces like the tiny bug (Untitled (1995)), which was placed on the head of the elephant in Not Afraid of Love (2000). This is certainly not what people anticipate when they hear “retrospective.” Then again, expecting the norm from an artist known for his humor, irreverence and subversion seems a bit foolish.

This retrospective marks the end of Cattelan’s career as an artist. But who knows? If Barbra Streisand’s two farewell tours is any indication, we may see this artist again sooner than we think.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

***

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

Monika Fryčová, Perpetuum Mobile, 2011. Image: Kling og Bang gallery.

Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral.

Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová became in her own words, a traveller who charted her own routes and made her own narratives without maps or guides. Consequentially, Fryčová’s works are highly improvised, and dependent on the indeterminacy and spontaneity of human interactions.

Monika Fryčová, Monika & Trabi in train station, Prostejov, 2005. Image: Monikafryčová.net

A red automobile-turned-limousine was an early, physical manifestation of Fryčová’s desire for mobility, which she drove to school in 2005 and finally made it to Berlin some years later where she was arrested by the traffic police for the car’s non-regulated standards. Intended as “moving sculpture” and created for the purpose of performance, the red Trabi is Fryčová’s assertion of artistic and political freedom beyond the spectre of the Iron Curtain, but also the artistic vindication of the dynamic flux and non-linear processes that characterise aspects of human nature.

Monika Fryčová, Open Springs no. 2, 2009, ongoing project. Image: Monikafryčová.net

Having investigated the artistic gestures that were given freer reign after a period of enforced socio-political isolation, her research now speculates upon the less charted regions of human existence: principles of chaos, intuition, perceptions and mythology. At the Kling og Bang Gallery, Fryčová’s framed photographs of herself shot in various positions and in diverse locations are perched on a peculiar machine acting like a turnstile that expends energy into rotating endlessly. Perpetually in motion, her static photographs disallow the viewer any prolonged contemplation; instead, we are forced into forming fleeting impressions of ambivalent spaces where specifics are really inconsequential. As long as Fryčová’s works situated themselves in that strange gap between motion and stillness – with a distorted sense of space and time embedded within -,  any attempt at linearity or continuity can only remain illusory.

****

Monika Fryčová was born in Prostejov, Czech Republic. She lives and works in both the Czech Republic and Iceland. Perpetuum Mobile runs until 18th December at the Kling og Bang Gallery in Reykjavik.

You walk in to a darkish room where ever-changing shapes move like a school of fish across the walls. After your eyes adjust, you find that the there are two benches sitting among six sculptures that are producing the schools of fish and that the fish are made out of nothing but light beams. These sculptures are metal. Simple geometry (sphere, cube, etc). The room is quiet and calming. Everyone who has been here talks about the unexpected smiles that slip onto their cynical faces, and it happens to you too.

Installation view Otto Piene: Lichtballett. Photo: Gunter Thorn. All photos courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center

To understand what is going on here, you have to look back to the 1960′s, which may have been the high point of art at MIT. During the sixties, arts funding was partially used as a counterbalance to the political consequences from the institute’s complicated and financially fertile military industrial connections. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) was founded in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes and immediately went about funding exhibitions and visits for some very interesting artists. With the available capital, an unavoidable optimism of postwar boom, and a complete lack of habits (good or bad) Kepes attempted to foster “media geared to all sensory modalities; incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather; [and] acceptance of the participation of ‘spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence.” (pdf)

Two of the first artists who were invited to visit MIT were Otto Piene and Hans Haacke (as well as Stan VanDerBeek). Piene was in the first round of fellows (meaning he was in residency for a year), and would succeed Kepes as director in 1968. Haacke was invited for a solo show at MIT in 1967. The body of work both presented consisted of systems, those very cloud/water/lights that Kepes hoped to present as art media.

Installation view: Hans Haacke, 1967.

This fall, Haacke’s solo-show has been reproduced at the MIT List Visual Art Center (LVAC). VanDerBeek and Haacke were both deeply influenced by the ideas of cybernetics. Haacke felt that controlling the storm, moving the meteorological indoors, skipped a layer of abstraction and released the artist from reproducing essential features of the world; immediacy was the only type of innovative art left to pursue. Unlike VanDerBeek’s social videos, Haacke created kinetic art systems, objects that set in motion an action that had no end point.

The approachable physicality and comic impossibility of watching a ball float on a jet of air, or seeing a refrigerator coil (covered in frozen ambient humidity) as a sculpture reminds us just how useless art can be; how archaic and aimless we could make our art. These works are unlike our current trends: useful and solemn responses to the internet, the economy, or the social conditions in relation to capitalism. These are objects that bewilder and add to our aesthetic understanding by wonder and query. The closest these sculptures get to being explicit is to make visible the relationship between the whole and the part, between the center and the exterior. 1967 was a very delicate moment in American history: the Vietnam war raging as were race riots, but it was still before the chaos of 1968. Instead of making politics explicit, for which Haacke is usually applauded, these sculptures sing wordless songs about the 1960′s societal changes. These examinations into natural systems granted him tools that he later used to investigate social systems, like the gallery and politics of Germany, but were timely investigations that presage his later work.

Otto Piene: Electric Rose, 1965. Polished aluminum globe with 160 timed neon lamps. Photo: Gunter Thorn

On the other side of the LVAC, Piene’s light sculptures from the 1960 and 1970′s have been painstakingly restored and presented (some for the first time in decades). Despite the opportunity of seeing some vintage Piene sculptures in perfect condition, the two new sculptures, One Cubic Meter of Black Light and Lichtballet steal the show. Both project light through perforations in their skin. Lichtballet is a wall of rotating lights hidden away from sight, the circular pattern of holes in the wall filters the light, manipulating the light into physical motion in the surrounding room. There is almost no reason to look at the objects that Piene has created, instead, you should be looking at their effects on your environment.

The sensations we see flowing around the room are light, directly and with no symbol. Instead of seeing how light lands on a sculptural object, the sculpture provides its own light, and uses the light as a physical material. It may be a sculptural analogy for Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Has Piene released light from being a shadow on the wall? It’s hard to tell, as every time you step into the room, you are enthralled by the light show’s charms. You immediately forget any theory laden narratives you may have about the work, and instead experience the motion and change for what it is, a grand environment that undercuts words and explanations. It’s a direct experience. It’s that visceral art that we’ve left behind. It’s an example of Kepes hope to present the art object as a confluence, a meeting of viewer and natural process.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett and Hans Haacke: 1967 are on view at the List Visual Arts Center through Dec 31, 2011.

Geraldine Javier, Blood Homage Series, 2011, Mixed Media, Dimensions variable.

Geraldine Javier’s show Museum of Many Things at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery presents an amalgamation of vintage mementos, framed animal skeletons, stuffed birds and elaborate needlework in a contemporary take of a Victorian-styled cabinet of curiosities.

While Javier’s assembly of curios appears to be a whimsical indulgence of the macabre, it is as much a nostalgic take on death’s inevitability as it is a layered reference to the early discursive practices of natural history and collecting. Embedded within her materials are pieces appropriated from the remains of an unnamed Creole woman’s now-defunct early twentieth century museum in the Philippines Archipelago; Javier’s theatrical installations utilise the visual language of harsh mortality mitigated by the soft beauty of carefully placed scraps, while paying tribute to the early narratives of human intervention committed to classify and expand systems of knowledge.

Geraldine Javier, Cabinet of Curiosities - Madame A, Mixed Media, 2011

Geraldine Javier, Cry, 2011

The ensuing effect is the presentation of a carefully orchestrated interface between (dead) organisms and a dressed environment that is strangely tantalising in its grotesqueness, a microscopic vision of a grand design that expresses estrangement and disharmony in our flawed universe. Blood Homage (2011) is a row of elaborately decorated cow skulls, below which, stumps of tree-like objects lie. Constructed out of branches, thread and wax, the installation is reminiscent of creative taxidermy that not only preserves the animal’s corpse under the guise of life but one that contributes to the cataloguing of nature while solidifying man’s mastery over his known environment. Next to the cows, tree trunks in a 4-panelled installation bleed 3-dimensionally outward, sheep flee from a conflagration off a mountain in; dead birds lie in-situ in their nests on a dying tree and frog skeletons seem to chase each other in a parody of animated movements.

Geraldine Javier, Cessation of Birds Song, Mixed Media, 2011

If museums are ciphers of collective memory that maintain a connection between ancient cultures and civilisations from which our modern sensibilities are derived, Javier’s display cases of exotica – her own museum in miniscule – secures instead, ephemeral and private moments that celebrate quirk, wonder and beauty.

***

Geraldine Javier:  Museum of Many Things is on show until 26 November 2011 at Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery and is a partner programme of Philippine Art Trek V.

Alex Spremberg, Chroma Flow (Object E), enamel on cardboard works on table, 2011, Courtesy of the artist and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Alex Spremberg’s current exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts is an exploration of the limits of painting and a meditation upon the throwaway materials that pervade contemporary life, specifically the omnipresent cardboard box and the printed newspaper. Wrong Angles is, ostensibly, a painting exhibition, but despite the polychromatic riot of surfaces dripped and marbled with industrial paint, Spremberg reveals a preoccupation with the formal properties of objects and the overlooked aesthetic systems which construct our experience of consumer items: food, household goods and even information.

In the series Chroma Flow, Oblique Objects and Conference, the artist has reconfigured the cardboard box by disrupting its standard right-angled (or orthogonal) construction. Rejecting the restrictions of the 90-degree join, Spremberg has sliced and folded along the diagonal, with the increasingly complex polygonal variations offering an alternate angularity to the familiar box. The surface of each form has been meticulously, painstakingly, covered by layer upon layer of colored enamel paint, and they sit boldly upon plinths constructed from stacked cardboard boxes painted white. Through these devices, Spremberg debases the conventions of museum display while elevating the humble cardboard box to the status of art object; this celebration of the utilitarian could be read as a parody of modernist abstraction. However, Spremberg’s fascination with the physical and optical properties of paint transcends any ironic intent; these works address in equal measure the process of applying paint to a surface and the desire to invest a painting with the presence of an object.

Alex Spremberg, Thrills and Spills (March), Digital print, 2011, Courtesy of the artist and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Reflecting Spremberg’s serendipitous approach, the photographic works that comprise the series Thrills and Spills were inspired by the process of making the box works. Having used sheets of newspaper to protect the surfaces of the studio while painting the objects, and upon observing the resultant drips and slicks that obscured the newspaper images, Spremberg discovered startling compositions in which the variegated paint both disrupted and distorted the original photograph. However, this description of Spremberg’s ‘collage paintings’ doesn’t convey their potential as interventions upon the found image or as a further play on the oft-unregistered ‘packaging’ that accompanies and constructs consumer life.

In Wrong Angles, Spremberg transforms everyday objects through strategies of fragmentation and obfuscation. These objects are divorced from their original purposes to varying degrees, and the ensuing effect is one of estrangement and elevation, which sees the coded aesthetics of consumer packaging simultaneously rejected and redeemed by the act of painting.

Jan Dibbets, "The Shortest Day at the Van Abbemuseum, 1970". Image courtesy of the gallery.

One stunning example is Jan Dibbets work, The Shortest Day at the Van Abbemuseum, 1970. Here Dibbets displays the work in the same place it was created. He photographed the incoming light into the exhibition space on the shortest day of the year in 1970.  A shot was taken every six minutes from sunrise to sunset. The focus adjustment and the position of the camera remain unchanged allowing the natural course of time and light to become clearly visible. Each element of this piece interacts with each other, from the current window being reflected in the photographs taken 41 years ago, to the outside light shining onto the archaic slide projector with the old dim light bulb. Here Jan Dibbet subtly communicates the powerful exchange between the making of art and the importance of place. Furthermore, the bold decision of the museum to return to this work in 2011 is a wonderful expression of the layering of time and change, not only by the exhibit, but also as a reflection of the circular evolution that occurs within the history of art.

Jan Dibbets, "The Shortest Day at the Van Abbemuseum, 1970". Image courtesy of the gallery.

Other works have been included because they focus on the debate about the role of the museum within traditional Dutch culture. Such as: Read the Masks. Tradition is not Given (2008 – 2009). A film by Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss about Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) as a cultural phenomenon that caused a great deal of controversy in the Netherlands a number of years ago.

Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss, "Read the Masks. Tradition is not Given" (2008 - 2009). Image courtesy of the gallery.

Wood Circle (1977) by Richard Long is a further approach to considering Eindhoven as a muse. Long’s construction reflects the immediate natural surroundings in connection to the cultural landscape of the city. Where the properties of Wood Circle evoke a transient nature, where life and decay create a sculpture that is forever changing.

Richard Long, "Wood Circle" 1977. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Although each artist collaborates with the city in their own manner, expressing a unique bond. Together they constructed an exhibition where concepts of: passing and change, old and new, come together to communicate Eindhoven as much more than an industrial city, but as a rich source of inspiration.

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Mildred's Lane," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17." Photo by Kristin Rochelle Lanz.

Some philosophy holds that the fundamental role of human beings is to be “world disclosers.”  Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions, a small yet conceptually powerful show at Oakland’s Pro Arts Gallery, demonstrates this principle via the visual arts.  The exhibit, curated by Amanda Cachia, is expansive in at least two important ways. First, the objects on view include both traditional and new media.  Even fashion, often omitted, is interestingly addressed.  The second inclusion is the more significant one: the makers of the work are all disabled people who have made disability their subject.

Some of you, I know, have just gone on to read another review.  Haven’t we had thirty years of identity politics?  Yes, indeed we have.  And some of it, as the critic Robert Hughes loved to point out, was narrow and preachy.  But hold on a minute.  The voices of “Medusa” are not “victimized voices.”  You’ll find enough canon-stretching and humor here to make a trip (or this article) worth your time.

True, this work is not heavy on visual appeal.  During my two-plus hours in the gallery, several visitors came and went rapidly, neglecting even the wall text.  But unlike the norm over the past three decades, there are sufficient enough making skills and aesthetic value present to capture the interest of a beholder longer than the standard, three-second gallery goer’s glance.  Slow and patient viewing is rewarded by encounters that permit seeing disabled people, our shared social world, and even ourselves differently.

Laura Swanson, "Peggy Lee," 2008. Inkjet Print, 20" X 30".

Some favorites include the inkjet prints of Laura Swanson.  Swanson has four punchy self-portraits exhibited that, at the very least, challenge the widespread narcissism rampant in contemporary Western society.  In them, the subject teases and frustrates our gaze.  Pillow depicts the artist, a little person, seated on a king-sized bed virtually hidden behind a red-and-beige checkered pillow with only her child-sized feet and hands visible.  Shower also nearly eliminates the portrait subject, who is engaged in the private act of washing behind a bunched-up veil of a translucent shower curtain.  Here the disabled body is blurred and hard to grasp.  Point made–in a teasing and sophisticated way–and well taken.

One of the images I would purchase, if not for my part-time teacher’s salary, is Swanson’s Peggy Lee.  At the center of the image, set in an interior, Swanson stands dwarfed by the stereo speakers of her own sound system; her entire wee form revealed in a blazing red t-shirt reading “West Coast” and hippy-flowered, dark pants.  Her face, traditionally the most revealing portion of a portrait, is substituted by an album cover featuring that of the comely 40s starlet, Peggy Lee.  While us able-bodied folks might try to avert our gaze from the sight of a little person out of politeness (“It’s not nice to stare at others”) or disgust at difference, or a complex mixture, Swanson beats us to the punch, reminding us that somebody at the other end of the viewing transaction also has mixed feelings, which we able-bodied can only imagine.

Joseph Grigely, "Songs Without Words (Eartha Kitt)," 2009. Pigment Print, 18" X 14". Ed. of 12.

A similar point about empathic imagination is made in Songs without Words, a pigment print by a deaf artist, Joseph Grigely, who employs the image of a yet another recording diva to convey his ideas.  Grigely has used an image appropriated from the New York Times obituary of Eartha Kitt, the Cherokee-African American actress and singer known for her distinctive sound.  This memorializing image, meant initially to do the work of evoking collective memories of the talents of the performer, is used here to evoke the private memories of the artist, and, subsequently, to pry open his audience’s minds.  When Grigely was ten he lost his hearing.  One wonders if he ever actually heard Kitt, but whether he did or not is moot.  His appropriation of the legend as the epitome of unique and individual sound is a telling metaphor of the death of his ability to enjoy the sensuous pleasure that many of us take for granted.  The ability to hear the ordinary rumblings of daily life is not the issue here; rather hearing is proposed as art.

Sunaura Taylor, "No Arms! (Self-Portrait)," 2010. Oil Paint on Print on Raw Canvas, 72" X 48".

Sunaura Taylor pulls off a similar coup in at least one work, as well.  Taylor deploys a compelling, intermedia blend of oil paint on printed paper (or canvas).  Her No Arms! (Self Portrait), a Photoshopped reworking of an old-timey photograph of a sideshow “freak,” communicates a sincere sense of just how a physical deformity (in this case, a congenital disability) might distort the self-image of the owner of that body.  If we can be coaxed to reflect on the effects of social judgements–such as calling someone “freak”– we then open to the possibility of altering our received notions of others.  And not just of the disabled, but of all other sorts of categorical name-calling.  At their most powerful, the works in “Medusa” engage viewers in a consideration of complex psycho-social interrelations and projections that are often denied.

A word must be added about the step this show takes toward disability fashion: a step which I hope combines with sustain-ability fashion.  Sandie Yi contributes photo-chromogenic prints of her wearable art, as well as some of the artifacts themselves.  The wall text explains that for generations, Yi’s family members have been born unpredictably variable numbers of toes and fingers.  Yi uses what some might view as a handicap to dream up self-defined standards of attractiveness, and–perhaps even more essential in wearables–of physical comfort.  Yi’s most alluring objects are delicate cuffs, constructed of translucent white fabric and white plastic molded into the shape of wrists, hand-embroidered with an inventive design of pink and beige floss that evokes the beauty of health and aliveness.  Arguing effectively against the look of conventional prosthetics and orthotics, Yi encourages a kind of innovation that links her work with DIY-art, theory, and aesthetics.  If this mode of thinking/making doesn’t sufficiently challenge our smug definitions of who is capable and who is not, what could?

Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, "Em-brace," 2011. Plastic, Fabric & Embroidery Floss. Set of 2 Chromogenic Prints, 20" X 30".

I continue to be intrigued by Carmen Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle, which stretches the definition of art furthest here.  Unfortunately, like most other viewers of this exhibit, I was unable to experience the work firsthand.  What is on offer at Pro Arts is documentation of Papalia’s participatory performances, in which the artist, who is not fully blind but has impaired vision, leads a shut-eyed human train over urban and rural terrain in acts of compassionate trust.  Three digital prints and repeating slideshow images portray able-bodied folks lined up behind Papalia, linked to one another by an extended right arm to the right shoulder of the person just ahead: a fleshy corpus of coordinated cooperation.

Although unrepresented in the show, a rendition of Shuttle was conducted in downtown Oakland on Wednesday, September 21, 2011, when to my chagrin I was already booked to lecture in a classroom.  Since I was not able to have this experience firsthand, I can only speculate.  But I am willing to wager that participants in this experience came away with an expanded sense of what it means to be impaired; and that, on reflection, they discovered something about their habitual way of being in the world by having “tried on the mode” of another.  If identity-politics in the visual arts have brought us anything lasting, it is the accumulation of just such significant moments of what Heidegger and his contemporary followers call “world disclosure.”

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Open Engagement Conference, Portland State University," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17". Photo by Heather Zinger.

For an earlier American educator and critic of the arts, John Dewey (who wrote during a period of economic Depression like that of our contemporary one), to produce, to trigger or to memorialize an experience that was distingushable from the habitrail of our everyday lives was the fundamental characteristic of an art work.  At its best this kind of art can enable us all to imagine and articulate alternatives to current social and even political conditions.  It can disclose possibilities previously untried or suppressed, or refocus our attention in ways that clarifies things previously unclear.  This kind of art could begin to regenerate the sense of hope that has been strip-mined from all but the most fortunate few in our society and thrust into the light of public discussion new ways to go forward, but differently.

“Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions,” is on view at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland through October 20, 2011.

Accordingly, there are many approaches to exploring the past in this exhibition.  Some artists take history itself as a subject, while others focus on particular events from the world-shaking to the minutely individualistic.  The overarching theme is solidly postmodernist; a conspicuous refutation of the existence of any single version of events.  In fact, History in Art reinforces the preference for subjectivity by presenting work by artists working in all media and at different stages of their careers.  In this way, the exhibition examines history from almost all angles and media, and the diversity is rewarding.

Shinji Ogawa, Then and Now, Krakow, 2010, acrylic on book

Shinji Ogawa’s practice involves a series of techniques that investigate the image by drawing, overdrawing, halving, doubling, and layering.  Along one wall are three vitrines that encase picture or travel books from various cities.  One example, Then and Now, Krakow (2010) shows two views—one antiquated, one more modern—of the city’s main square with its famous Cloth Hall.  Ogawa has drawn the architectural elements that are cropped out of the originals across the gutter of the book.  His work links the two individual pictures, extending the scene and bringing the past in touch with the present.

Krystyna Piotrowska, I Left Poland Because…, 2010, video, 31 min

Loss haunts many of the works in the exhibition.  Krystyna Piotrowska‘s I Left Poland Because… (2010) is a two-channel video projected into the cleft of two angled walls.  Very simply, the two images show a close-up shot of a person uttering sentences beginning with “I left Poland because…” On the left, the person speaks in Polish; on the right, she speaks in English.  When one side is speaking, the other is frozen.  One quote: “I left Poland because it was the only country where I couldn’t be Polish.”  The components of this installation all contribute meaningfully to the whole: the angled walls create a setting where the speaker looks at the audience, but also nearly faces her estranged self.   Additionally, the switch between Polish and English very deftly facilitates an awareness of how language creates identity. The immobility of one side while the other talks points to the barriers of language and the slippage of translation.  In the gap between languages, how much is lost?

Robert Kuśmirowski, Processing, 2011, installation

Robert Kusmirowski’s Processing (2011) is a room-sized installation wherein classical sculptures are ground to dust.  One side begins with the figures in packing cases, then on leftward to threshing and winnowing machines, to a flourmill, a drill, and a sawmill cart.  This allegorical factory reduces even the most durable members of art’s legacy to mere grist for the mill.

Boaz Arad, Marcel, Marcel, 2000, video

Videos presented on flat-screen monitors are scattered throughout the exhibition.  It seems fitting that digital video, that most plastic of media, should be used to examine and recreate history.  Boaz Arad‘s work, for example, uses the flexibility of video combined with humor to address the legacy of Hitler and the Nazis.  100 Beats (1999) lampoons Hitler as a pervert masturbating onstage by looping a short clip of der Führer moving his hand in his pocket.  Shalom Jerusalem takes short clips from various archives of Hitler’s speeches to create a public address that never happened: Hitler saying, “Shalom Jerusalem, I apologize.”   In Marcel, Marcel (2000) Hitler’s mustache is playfully re-imagined.  This strategy of using absurdity to counter fear and brutality brings welcome levity to the exhibition as a whole.  Hitler’s reign may seem both geographically far and historically distant to an American audience, but the effects of World War II are still keenly felt in modern-day Poland.  By heightening the buffoonery of a murderous little dictator, Arad swabs old wounds with new laughter.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice.

Catlin Moore: Let’s start with the book, Modernity in Very General Terms. This piece spans the course of ten years’ worth of writing and research for you, and also serves as a tutorial for your  exhibition currently on view at Ambach & Rice in Los Angeles, Conclusion to the Big Ideas. For those unfamiliar with your work, how are the concepts in the book incarnated in the exhibition, or are they? Is this a relationship you have forged in previous bodies of work?

Alon Levin: I wouldn’t really call the book a tutorial, it is more of a collection of notes to myself. I made the book before I made the work for the show, and I included the book to serve similarly in the context of the exhibition: as a companion piece that is on the one hand a work in and of itself, but that at the same time provides a kind of background to the rest of the exhibition.

CM: Some sections of the book are more minimal than others. For example, “An Introduction to Europolis” consists of incredible detail, empirical evidence and formulas, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” is more allusive.  Why the variation in presentation, and how does that manifest in the tangible artwork?

AL: All the texts and works within the book were originally made with different intentions. Some segments were written to myself, some to friends, some for publication, and still others as works [of art] in and of themselves. “An Introduction to Europolis” was a work that was published in dot dot dot in 2004, while “The Object As Never Seen Before” was part of a reader that accompanied an installation in 2010. Since the book was not written at once or in any linear way, it is as fragmented and seemingly under construction as the rest of the work in the exhibition. Both the written and the physical work range from the severely abstract to the absolutely concrete, while dealing all the while with whatever issues are of interest to me. In that sense, they don’t seem so at odds with one another to me. They are two poles of a language that sometimes clash and sometimes merge.

Book view, courtesy of the artist.

CM: The book explores the experience of finding patterns and relationships within power structures and modern realities. Did you unearth data or information that caused you to view your practice differently? What is alluring about parameters, rules, taxonomy and thematic patterns in modern culture to you?

AL: Maybe it is my background—between countries, cultures, schooling systems, and nationalities—that drew me toward the subject of power structures. I had many run-ins with bureaucracy, and never did well with authority.  I went to six high schools in three different countries.  At a young age I had already decided that power was assumed through symbols and costume and was not to be trusted. I suppose my strong distaste for hierarchy is the reason for my obsession with it. I can’t locate any ideological shift as of yet, but the constant confrontation with ‘modern reality’ in its many incarnations of administration has undoubtedly informed my practice.

CM: Do you find yourself employing irony or humor as a means of illustrating these points?

AL: I don’t see my work as being nearly as serious as its subject supposes it is.  Maybe because power and its structures are so severe, I try to approach the work with a kind of humor. I don’t mean to illustrate some joke or have a punch line, but I do think it is important that people recognize the irony and can see the subject with some distance. I think the subject (and my practice) can use a little mockery.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Some of the text is purposefully nonsensical in its evaluation of social patterns and successes.  Why is this an important attribute to highlight?

AL: I seem to make things just as nonsensical as the quest for a social pattern.

CM: Can you explain the notion of “objects attempting to understand themselves?” Is this an intended parallel to the human condition?

AL: It’s a little hard to give an explanation about that. I was meaning this more as an intuitive thought rather than a scientific analysis.  Obviously, things do not become aware of themselves. So let me give you another somewhat cryptic anthropomorphic thought: I am thinking of an elephant trying to hide behind a skinny tree, not being aware of its own dimensions.

CM: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is perhaps my favorite section of the book. What was your goal here, and how did the concept manifest itself in the exhibition?

AL: “Quarter Report 1 / Men With Ties” is a series of collages from images published in an entire quarter of the New York Times. It is a somewhat absurd reorganization of all these images by theme or subject. I started collecting the images without a clear idea of what I was going to do with them with the intention of somehow making sense of it all in the end.  When I started sorting everything, some groupings that emerged were very concrete: such as “International protests” and “American protests.” Others, on the other hand, were simply collections of recurrent gestures and tendencies. Examples of these are “Men with one hand I and II,” “Men with two hands I and II,” “Three men,”" Men with ties I, II, III” or “Verticals.”

In some ways the current show is like a quarter report, though one that spans a longer period of time and is not particularly methodical. Some things have been omitted, while many new things have been added. The show is a kind of rearrangement and reinterpretation of thoughts, ideas and actual physical works. This is particularly clear in the work Untitled, ‘The Everything of an Almost Future I – V,’ 2011. This tower-like structure houses a collection of sketches I made for a series of painting cut-outs that were based on Malevich’s work. These sketches were used in preparation for an installation I made last year and now are restructured as an exaggerated archival shelving unit.

CM: Focusing on the art itself, much of your earlier work included color, both as an organizational illustration of your practice and an aesthetic choice. This show is quite minimal and stark.  How does that choice function for you?

AL: Though the show may give a first impression of being minimal, beyond perhaps the aesthetic relation to minimalism, I think the work is anything but. The objects in the show have an overload of layers, both in the physical sense and conceptually. Rather than ideas being reduced, they are in fact expanded and all layers of the process are kept transparent. Be it the stacks that hold the piles of frames so that they can be painted, the earlier paint job still shown on the edge of an object, or simply the expanded history of modernity in the two-volume, custom-made, print-on-demand Wikipedia-book, Modernity in Very General Terms, 2011, that serves as a balancing foot to the object in Prospects of Validation IV, 2011.

Installation view, courtesy of Ambach & Rice

CM: Many of the works feel deconstructed. In your evaluation of constructed societal practices, was this a tongue-in-cheek decision, or purely compositional?

AL: Definitely not purely compositional.  The deconstructing starts in my initial dealing with a subject matter; this is later translated into the process and thus is still evident in the resulting physical structure. Deconstruction (and my general demeanor, I’m afraid) is usually perceived as a rather serious matter, so I am glad you asked.  And yes, I mostly mean it to be tongue-in-cheek!

CM: Despite exploring the very notions of genre and boundary, your work defies common art historical references. There is no nod to abstraction, realism or the like, but it does remains conceptual. Was this an organic development in your work?

AL: Well, just as I have a resistance to power, absolutes, and definitions in the real world, I suppose I avoid it within the realm of art. Any one genre with its doctrines or manifestos is fun to investigate, but mostly to then push off of, not to adopt or join. I don’t want my work to belong to something that is already defined, or to be read from any singular perspective.

CM: You’ve referred to your works as a stage.  How does that hold true?

AL: I guess I say “stage,” because the work often functions as a model for something else: something bigger, or something real. In the meantime, the work itself is more of a prop, part of a somewhat theatrical version of societal operations.

Levin’s current exhibition is on view at Ambach & Rice through October 8, 2011.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation view. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

For the moment, the beating heart of Los Angeles’s Pacific Standard Time is Betye Saar’s installation Red Time, 2011, at Roberts and Tilton.  Saar has transformed the middle room of the gallery into a shrine for past, present, and future, painting Roberts and Tilton’s interior room a bright red and allowing a variety of her customary assemblage works to act as friends and neighbors to each other, despite where they were collected from or when they were made.  In fact, one of the most striking things about Red Time is the position it takes on memory and history.  While Saar has divided Red Time into three separate sections–”In the Beginning,” “Migration and Transformation,” and “Beyond Memory”–she has also unified them through her use of a singular, strong background color and their enclosure in one small room.

Betye Saar, "There Will Be Blood," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 22.25 x 22.25 in (56.5 x 56.5 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Saar first rose to prominence in the 1960s as a Joseph Cornell-inspired assemblage artist who insistently tackled issues of race and history, and these issues remain central, both figuratively and literally.  Many of the pieces that make up the “Migration and Transformation” section of Red Time, which occupies the wall opposite the room’s entrance, are radical détournements of Aunt Jemimah and Uncle Tom figures, a technique that Saar may have been the first to utilize and perfect.  In fact, it is the juxtaposition of the pleasing formal rhythms, the coziness of the physical space, and the chilling historical narratives referenced by pieces such as There Will Be Blood, 2011, To the Manor Born, 2011, and Is Jim Crow Really Dead, 1972, that drives the work.

Betye Saar, "To the Manor Born," 2011. Mixed media assemblage. 11.5 x 20.5 x 2.25 in (29.2 x 52.1 x 5.7 cm). Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar, "Red Time," 2011. Installation View. Image courtesy of Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Among the works that Saar felt absolutely needed to be present in the installation is Red Ascension, 2011, a wooden ladder hung toward the top of the wall in “Beyond Memory.”  Nestled amongst the rungs are wooden sculptures that tell a familiar story:  an African mask, several wooden ships, chains, and a crescent moon and star.  The ladder points viewers to the wall that is both the first and last in the exhibit, the wall to which their backs are turned for the majority of time they are in the room.  It is the wall with the entry and exit door, on which a series of masks hang, looking back at the viewers with all manners of expression.  Red Time is not solely a time of despair or anger.  It is also a time of rebirth and open-ended questioning.

Bischoff Soren Black installation image, 2011. Image courtesy of Johansson Projects

The current exhibit at Johansson Projects is how Oakland often seems; vibrant, mysterious and disorienting, with an underlying hum of recognition. The title of the show, BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK, when said aloud sounds like it could be part of a chant or spell, or the name of some mythical creature, when it is simply the last names of the three featured artists, Brice Bischoff, Tabitha Soren and Ellen Black. The works of all three artists combine to create a narrative of time, space, humanity and chaos.

Brice Bischoff, Bronson Cave VI, c-print, 2011

Upon first entering the gallery, you’re confronted with the contrast of Ellen Black’s stark, abstract geometric sculptures housing small video screens, and the dreamy cave interiors created by Brice Bischoff, that look like he was somehow able to get a whole rainbow to sit (relatively) still long enough to release the shutter of his camera. The caves filled with the unintelligible blurs use the magical capabilities of photography to illuminate and emphasize the mystical, contrasting qualities of caves and the light that fills them. The depth of each location anthropomorphizes the earth’s occupants before living creatures evolved – giving  life to the elements.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15759-3, pigment print, 2011

This quiet, pre-human interaction between earth, fire, water and air crashes into the violent un-worldliness of Tabitha Soren’s photographs. By inverting the images, Soren presents us with a tumultuous world that brings to mind the primordial soup from which we all came. With water crashing everywhere, it is sometimes hard to firmly orient oneself on the ground, causing the same kind of uneasiness one feels when stepping off a boat after being on the water for hours.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 06734-20, pigment print, 2011

As soon as you feel like you’re finally getting a grasp of what is going on, Ellen Black’s video installations throw you back into the abstract. The white containers that hold her tiny video screens are more like quantum cubes than “boxes,” with edges and corners jutting out as if an unexpecting polygon was frozen while in transformation from one shape to another. The video pieces reflect their containers’ fluctuating desolation, with bleak beach scenes layered on top of other geographic scenes that break through the video’s digital deterioration, while miniature silhouetted figures wander with no apparent purpose across the landscape, some may be playing or drowning in the surf.

Ellen Black, Last Summer, single channel video, 2011

The experience of viewing the exhibition is one of quiet turmoil in contrast with the inherent beauty of the natural world. Like watching a video of a forest fire with the sound off, you know that something destructive is happening, but you know it will lead to regeneration. And of course there’s no denying how beautifully mesmerizing it is.

BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK will be on view at Johansson Projects until October 15, 2011.