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Philippe Parreno

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WEEK 29

IF THIS THEN ELSE, an exhibition by Philippe Parreno. IF THIS THEN ELSE is a two-location exhibition at Gladstone Gallery; two spaces connected throughout the city, a two-headed beast. Installed at one location, a bioreactor houses microorganisms and serves as a living command center for the exhibition at both locations. It is a time based-exhibition and a conditional construct. Scripted events are automated by command lines executed within a computer: if a light goes off, then a film is screened and the temperature in the room changes; if the film finishes screening, then the lights are turned on. Activities within the bioreactor control the overall scenario of the exhibition, although the computer writes and repeats the scripts with some variation. Inside the bioreactor, the microorganisms anticipate the rhythms, “predictable” qualities, and dramaturgy of the exhibition environment. In return, the organisms can alter the conditions within the bioreactor and in the exhibition space outside of its habitat, revealing a basic relationship between time and living matter. When the microorganisms inside the bioreactor detect time-related variations, they can mutate or evolve in anticipation of future variations. Alternatively, they can remain passive and follow the transformations by adjusting their inner molecular clocks. The gallery is a domestic setting with shifting climate, light and sound. Filled with helium, new species of fish in My Room Is Another Fish Bowl (2016) hover mid-air in the changing atmosphere on the parlor floor. Happy Ending (2015), transparent blown-glass lamp sculptures, illuminate their own ghostly presence intermittently. 

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Thomas Wilfred

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WEEK 28

WEEK 28

In the late 1950s and early '60s, a countercultural scene took shape around Film Culture magazine, a periodical founded in 1954 in New York City by two Lithuanian immigrant brothers, Adolfas and Jonas Mekas. This community of Beat writers, avant-garde artists, underground filmmakers and other societal dropouts and contrarians established itself in opposition to conventional understandings of art, dance, literature, criticism, cinema and society. A diversity of voices within the pages of the magazine articulated the aesthetic, social and cultural significance of film. More importantly, they called for a new kind of film culture, one marked by a revolutionary zeal to develop independent modes of film production, distribution and exhibition.   EDIT FILM CULTURE! zeroed in on selected aspects of the history of Film Culture magazine, including key protagonists and associated institutions over four decades of somewhat regular publication. Organized as an installation of eleven tables, it highlighted such subjects as the magazine's founding; the development of the New American Cinema; innovations in graphic design; and interconnected avant-garde scenes (including Fluxus and Andy Warhol's Factory). The final table provided a sneak preview of documents and page proofs from the magazine's first issue in over twenty years, Film Culture 80: The Legend of Barbara Rubin, which will be published by Spector Books. Acrylic glass reproductions of the covers of all seventy-nine issues and excerpts from select articles provided material proof of Film Culture's programmatic and editorial concepts. Original photographs, documents, magazine layouts and advertising material supplied contextual information and highlighted Fluxus founder George Maciunas's graphic design. A sampling of Jonas Mekas's diary entries offered a personal perspective on moments in the magazine's history. A selection of films marked key stages in the development of the North American cinematic avantgarde, from Maya Deren to Joyce Wieland. At the heart of the exhibition, all original issues of the magazine were available for perusal in a temporary library. The multimedia installation UNITED SCREENS made use of interview material to depict the multi-faceted challenges faced by alternative filmmakers, distributors, and cinema exhibitors in the Global South today. UNITED SCREENS also examined the systems, strategies and successful deviations - between micro and macro politics – that individuals and institutions presently employ and will mobilize in the future in order to sustain this alternative film culture.

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WEEK 27

WEEK 27

Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light is the first exhibition on this groundbreaking artist and his spellbinding light compositions in more than forty years. As early as 1919, well before the advent of consumer television and video technology, Wilfred began experimenting with light as his primary artistic medium, developing the means to control and project colorful, luminous forms that have been compared to the aurora borealis—and which he referred to collectively as lumia. The exhibition features nearly half of the extant light works by Wilfred representing each phase of his career, from early at-home instruments made for individual viewers to his most ambitious public installation, Lumia Suite, Opus 158, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1963 and recently restored in a joint conservation project by the Gallery and MoMA. Also included in the exhibition are sketches and diagrams from the artist’s archive, now in Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives collection. Recognized as an innovator by artists of his time such as Jackson Pollock, László Moholy-Nagy, and Katherine Dreier, Wilfred has since disappeared from the story of American modernism. Lumia restores this avant-garde artist to his rightful place at the forefront of kinetic and light art.

Thomas Wilfred uses metal, glass, electrical and lighting elements, and a frosted-glass screen in a hinged wood cabinet, indefinite playing time in this mesmerising exhibition. I believe viewing it in real life would be completely different rather than in youtube videos as its difficult to determine the size of each installation, which I think would create an different impact in the audience as if its a large installation it would feel different rather than the small one on the screen.

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Wangechi Mutu

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WEEK 26

WEEK 26

Wangechi Mutu presented a beautiful exhibition in Gladstone Gallery. The title for this exhibition comes from the Gikuyu words for mud and trees, the prima materia for this body of work. Expanding her sculptural practice, this installation proposes an alternative to the systemic modes of representation in both Western and Eastern traditions by reimagining and recontextualizing the relations between the body, the natural world, and social forces. Well known for collages of hybrid forms drawn from folklore, popular culture, and art history, this new work marks an evolution in Mutu’s critique of the construction of self-image. The complex texture and form that these figures offer prompt inquiry into the relationship between human existence and environment, producing interactions both intimate and challenging. Mutu transforms the gallery space into a terrestrial cosmology that spans the microscopic to the mythic. Drawn from the dirt and brush in areas around her studio, she conjures a world replete with chimerical paradox. Faces of women, ornamental footwear, and patterned spheres evoking viruses emerge from natural materials that elaborate on the traditions of makonde carving. Embracing the raw physicality of her surroundings, she mobilizes the earth as a continuation of her own complex intersectional identity and artistic query. Adding gravity to these roughhewn totems, each invokes the psychic and social struggle for control over bodies through capitalism, the fetish, and disease. Seating of grey blankets grounds the installation, inviting audiences “to enter a place and re-think themselves.” This environment sets the stage for two new cast bronze sculptures that directly confront the myths of representation. A large-scale sculpture of an nguva, a water-woman of East African folklore, is at once familiar and otherworldly. Based on the transformation of the aquatic dugong, an herbivore closely related to the manatee, into the siren of superstition, Mutu staves off the disappearance of biological diversity and traditions of mythmaking by coalescing what she calls “the cross-pollination of ideas” into objects of desire. In another work, Second Dreamer (2016), she challenges the stasis of the bust and the appropriation of African masks through a self-portrait that captures the potential of psychic life. In this way, Mutu’s sculpture acts as a corrective to a violent cultural consciousness, while offering an alternative narrative of embodiment and being in the world.

Mutu uses a single room with light grey walls and slightly darker grey floors. This installation is breathtaking even through the screen. Her work is positioned all around the room, with similar sculptures opposite to one another, this creates a very aesthetically please look. However in my opinion the pieces would be significantly more eye catching if they were slightly further apart, yet they work together creating a harmony of some sort. 

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MATTEW BARNEY

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WEEK 25

WEEK 25

Matthew Barney has presented an exhibition in Gladstone Gallery  called Embrasure, an exhibition of new drawings, etchings, and sculpture. The works in Embrasuredraw from the narratives, processes, and imagery introduced

in Barney’s latest project Redoubt, while expanding on its allegorical and cosmological themes. Barney’s 2018 film Redoubt is set on a wolf hunt in Idaho’s rugged Sawtooth Mountains, continuing the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with landscape as both setting and subject. Redoubt adopts the ancient myth of Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Actaeon, a hunter who trespasses on her, as its narrative framework. In Redoubt, an Engraver, played by Barney, creates a series of plein-air drawings on copper plates as he stalks Diana and her attendants. An Electroplater in a remote laboratory subjects them to a chemical process that transforms the Engraver’s drawings: each plate is immersed in an electroplating solution, causing copper growths to form on the engraved lines. Her actions, undertaken with a ritualistic focus, transform the engravings into talismanic objects, connecting them to Barney’s work in drawing, sculpting, and performance. The drawings in Embrasure, made with graphite and charcoal in the artist’s richly colored plastic frames, take the characters, sites, and iconography of Redoubt as points of departure into a world more ominous and strange. In these intricate drawings, Diana is rendered as a fierce deity, replete with tactical gear; Actaeon, whose mythical death is only a subtext in Redoubt, is here fully transformed and impaled on a burnt tree. Ornate fortresses of war allude to the military architecture that inspired this new project and its title; elevation maps are abstracted into feverish patterns. Barney’s fascination with the topography of Idaho is equaled here by a fixation on the celestial landscape, as the Lupus constellation – the wolf – appears in several drawings. In Embrasure, Barney also debuts a series of etchings that combine traditional printmaking processes with the electroplating technique developed in Redoubt. In this case, a network of copper is propagated through minute pores in the paper etchings, creating nodules that partially obscure the engraved lines. In addition to the works on paper, Barney presents a new sculpture, which he made with a tree harvested from a forest fire area in the Sawtooth Mountains. The work was made by pouring molten brass and copper into a hollowed-out recess in the tree, creating a unique cast that layers the two metals in an unrepeatable organic form.  

In this exhibition Matthew’s bright and colourful work is beautifully installed in contrast to plain white walls. The paintings/drawings are aligned together in a simple pattern, which attracts the viewers eye. Whereas the sculptures are positioned in the middle of the rooms, so you could walk around it and observe from every angle. He placed all of the very colourful works together leaving the pieces that are duller separate to create a better contrast. In my opinion this exhibition would be much more effective if you would see it in real life as then you can see everything together in the room as well as see all of the details of each work better than on the screen,