gallery
pixilerations
I have some work (shown here and here) in Pixilerations V.4, part of FirstWorksProv.
Seeing and Being Seen
A review of Super Vision at the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
By Jeanne Jo
Riding in the enormous freight elevator felt a bit like rising skyward in Willie Wonka’s elevator made of glass. The Institute of Contemporary Art has a glass elevator that doesn’t break free of the ceiling and start flying around, but it does afford riders a few tantalizing glimpses of the Boston waterfront as it soars heavenward.
I’m enjoying the bird’s-eye view, so I reluctantly exit when it reaches the fourth floor. As I look around, I catch a glimpse of a brilliantly shiny Anish Kapoor piece, a smaller variation of Chicago’s Cloud Gate. Entering the Super Vision show in the West Gallery, I find myself in a small and bright room that is packed with artwork and people.
The Kapoor sculpture, titled Turning the World Inside Out dominates the first room, reflecting everything around it like a microcosm of the exhibition itself. Behind it, and emulating its dazzling surface, is a mirrored rectangular box by Josiah McElheny, hanging on the wall. A one-way mirror allows viewers to see inside the box, where a row of mirrored glass jars appears to be reflected endlessly. Across the room is an eerie, panoptic Gursky photograph and nearby, a relief sculpture by Ricci Albenda gracefully extends out of the wall. Although all of these pieces can be loosely connected around the theme of visual perception, it is not the main concept behind any one of them.
Digital technology advances quickly, in dog years, rather than human years. Although the concept of Super Vision is to illuminate the ways that “new technologies have pushed the limits of the visible world, allowing us to see almost anything,†there are very few works in the exhibition that use a new technology to illuminate this idea.
The few lonely examples stand out. In a room in the middle of the exhibition floor, Tony Oursler’s five projected Eye pieces are nestled behind Mona Hatoum’s video installation, Corps Etranger (Foreign Body). Hatoum’s piece was made in 1994, which, in digital-dog years, makes it about 84 years old. Older still is Yoko Ono’s video surveillance piece, Sky TV, which was created in 1966. With the same embrace of administered mediation that keeps us checking the Weather Channel instead of looking outside, Sky TV keeps tabs on what is happening within a specific rectangle of sky over the harbor, providing viewers inside the gallery with a glimpse of the outside world. Although interesting in 1966, the piece feels dated and superfluous in a show about “super vision†in 2007.
Some work in the show is less antiquated. Although Runa Islam’s piece uses an older technology, 16mm film, it was created in 2004. Be the First to See What You See as You See It is appropriately near artist and physicist Harold Edgerton’s famous stroboscopic photograph of a bullet piercing an apple. Islam’s film can be seen as an updated version of Edgerton’s work. Both artists document things that happen too quickly for the human mind too absorb. In Islam’s film, a woman coolly pushes chinaware off white table-clothed tables. Slowed down, the film shows each item as it breaks, transformed from a pristine object into a shattered mess.
Sharing the room with the Edgerton and Islam pieces is a Sigmar Polke painting, There is Nothing More Real than Pictures You Can’t Get Out of Your Mind. Painted with a nostalgic tonality that is reminiscent of Islam’s film, Polke’s painting of a carbon atom is mouth watering, despite the bug that is embedded in its layers and the paint that overlaps onto the frame itself. The paint on the frame seems to only increase the passionate depths within it, as if there is too much for the canvas to actually contain. Peering into the painting is like peering into a body of water, up ended. Full and deep, it is a world unto itself.
The new building for Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art is glorious, designed to both see and to be seen. Its glass walls fill the interior space with natural light, providing breathtaking views of the harbor and showing the rest of the world the bustling activity within. As the inaugural exhibition of the ICA, Super Vision is a collection of superstar works of art. It is easy to love the works individually. However, as an exhibition, Chief Curator Nicholaus Baume stretches to thread his idea throughout. He chooses work that reflects upon the nature of technology without making the jump to incorporate it literally into the works on display. He relies on established artists instead of pushing the boundaries with fresh perspectives. As Super Vision is the ICA’s first attempt at understanding its new visibility, perhaps next time, it will be willing to push a little harder.
NYC
near Jake’s cousin’s apartment in Brooklyn
asian tourist photos in the moma store mirror (with new haircuts)
serena’s gorp corp album cover
watching the nyc marathon with serena and nathaniel
Lesson Learned
delirium + dance-athon + running down stairs = sprained ankle.
But even a sprained ankle won’t keep me from the 7:10 AM bus to NYC tomorrow morning! I have an ace bandage and I’m not above hobbling around if I have too. I’m off to install the Duo show for D+M. (I’m a Project Manager, part of my assistantship this semester.) Serena is already there, she took the RISD van with Gideon earlier today. She lived in New York for three years while she went to NYU film. We have big plans for eating out and getting our hair cut.
Triton Mobley just saved my life. Or at the very least, my evening.
So, part of my assistantship is to be a “Digital Media Show Organizer.” After working at the Nevada Museum of Art for several years, I figured that it would be pretty easy. However, my first task, being the Assistant Exhibition Organizer of Pixilerations has been a challenge ever since its beginning. The exhibit is in an old warehouse, dirty and creepy-a very cool place that I would love to have a studio in, but not a fun space to try to install complicated digital artwork in. (The power strips alone have been a nightmare.) The building is so old that even getting the place unlocked is a challenge. It has to be done in a specific way. You have to enter by unlocking the back door, go through the entire warehouse to unlock the front door, and then go back and relock the back door for safety.
Despite the challenges, we had a lovely opening last weekend and today I went in to gallery sit from 2:00 - 6:00. It was a pretty uneventful day…I sat and read my new copy of Physical Computing and chatted with the other gallery sitter, Tryn, a senior undergrad in visual art at Brown.
A little after 6:00, Tryn and I locked the front door, turned off the lights, and walked through the huge, creepy, dark gallery towards the back door. We got to the back, put the key in the door, and…..nothing. Key won’t turn. Not even a little bit.
After five or six futile minutes, I decided that this is silly. “Let’s go to the front door, you’ll go outside, I’ll lock the door, you can come around to the back door, I’ll slip the key out to you and you can unlock the door and let me out.” Makes sense, right? Back through the dark, scary gallery. Tryn goes out and I make my way nervously back to the back door, alone.
Tryn comes around to the back, I slip her the key, she tries to unlock the door….nothing. A little budging of the lock, but nothing. Daniel Howe, one of the artists in the show walks by and starts helping..but no, I’m still stuck inside. A policeman comes over and starts helping. Then he leaves. I’m still stranded. We decide to try the front door, just in case it decides to magically allow us to lock it from the outside. I make my way through the gallery to the front, but no, the front door really does have to be locked from the inside. So what do I do?? I can leave through the front door, but I won’t be able to lock it behind me. And I’m technically “in charge” of the space at the moment. I don’t have any of the phone numbers of the committee who runs the exhibit. Lucky and Clara aren’t answering their phones. I can’t leave the gallery unlocked, it has tons of expensive equipment in it! I’m starting to freak out a little. But then I think, I should call one of my classmates…one of them is bound to be in the studio and will maybe be able to find Lucky for me. I call Triton. I tell him what’s happening (in, I’m embarrassed to say, what was probably my most pathetic tone of voice) and he immediately says, “I’ll be right there.” To cut this long story short, because of Triton, the key, and a metal L bracket-the door was unlocked and I was set free! TRITON MOBLEY, YOU ARE MY BFF!!!
