Pour Your Body Out

Pipilotti Rist
"Pour Your Body Out"
MOMA

by damali and diedra

I don't usually feel comfortable at MOMA, with all of the nose-in-the-air snobs. Pipilotti Rist's Pour Your Body Out changed that, if only for a brief moment. Having sofas and people taking their shoes off was part of it. Maybe the snobs avoided this installation. Or perhaps it's hard to be stuck up with your shoes off or sitting on the floor. I sat on the floor against the wall, as all the seats on the round central sofa were taken. I sat there for a long time watching the video and watching the people. The vivid colors in the video were entrancing. A woman who also couldn't fit in the sofa area, sat in the middle of the floor and breastfed her child with giant flowers and body parts projected on the wall behind them. This "performance" seemed right at home in this environment.




There were three large walls with projections on them. Flowers. Lots of pink. Clear close ups of eyes, face, body. Some images looked like being inside a jello cube. The contrast in scale of all the visitors and the one body being projected was astounding. You think you are so big, in the moment of looking at the self and then there's all these other people each with their own inside, close up, in the mirror, in the self and then many are brought together under the exaggeration of scale. Many and one. It reminds me of Iyengars yoga meditation inhale with all the people of the world and exhale the self joining with them. One and many. Together. Perspective and scale and moments.

Elf World: Inneractive Apiecolypse

Speaking of girls pointing cute plastic guns, I saw a paper mache life sized elf on a bison pointing a machine gun that had been colorfully decorated in a zigzag pattern. Attached to her bison was a cart with a tent full of freshly baked apple pies.

I am deeply interested in immersive environments for play and the great panorama of Elf World lured me in. The colors were spectacular and thoughtful, lots of saturation and brightness and textures. The quilt of hexagons and other textures made for a watering hole.

We heard there would be pies for the eating. There were pies inside the cart but no cutlery. A clear sign these were not the pies to be eaten. Amidst our search, Barbara approached us and announced there are pies and tea in the back for the eating.
Her husband Tom was selling souvenirs, you could even get a pattern to make the ply wood structure of the bison.

Feeling under dressed, and like a tourist to Elf World, as I ate my slice of apple pie, I sifted through the colors and textures and observed my surroundings, the variety of American symbols - apple pies, guns, teepees, great landscapes of the west, traditional native american patterns, a contemporary windmill, the bison, a "factory" of elf women on the pie making mission from the gathering of grains, picking the apples to baking them. Suddenly I felt the distance between my food source and the makers of my food in my own everyday.

Nevertheless, to complete my blue-jean wearing tourist experience of this art installation, I had to have my picture taken eating the said pie. mmm mmm



Elf World: Inneractive Apiecolypse
Space 1026

Guns and Chandeliers at Gallery Imperato, Baltimore MD

Gallery Imperato's current exhibit features work by two very different painters: Shannon Cannings and Jessica Dunegan. Both artists have limited their subject matter here and the pairing makes for an interesting contrast. While Cannings' paintings depict plastic toy guns (packaged and unpackaged) executed in smooth and realistic detail, Dunegan's work examines chandeliers and their complex structure in a more subjective and dreamlike fashion. Where Cannings uses oil on canvas applied in the traditional manner to portray familiar children's playthings, Dunegan makes her hanging, luminous objects appear fuzzy and stringy through the use of white resin seemingly encased in a field of reflective black. Along with these, Dunegan displays another variation on her theme: a series of chandelier images seen through filmy colored glass.

Overall, Dunegan's work commands more visual and conceptual interest; its technical complexity and subtle imagery encourage one to linger a bit longer. Cannings' work, while nicely painted, only takes the viewer so far. Two of the paintings show larger than life toy guns in their retail packaging, complete with pushpins holding them to the wall. Another series, of single squirt guns lying on a white surface, presents the objects as plastic "still life". The one painting which breaks from this mode consists of a tiara wearing little girl pointing a toy gun directly at the viewer. This work, with its heavy handed imagery, removes whatever opportunity Cannings' other paintings offer for a variety of viewer responses.

January 30 - March 14, 2009

www.galleryimperato.com

Farewell Franz

The Baltimore Museum of Art's Franz West retrospective has closed and the work is now being packed away in crates marked FRAGILE. Fragile is a word that could be applied to the work itself, not only for the materials used to make it (papermache, cardboard, and plaster, among other things), but also for the feeling it evokes. West is an Austrian artist who grew up in the unsettled (and unsettling) atmosphere of post WWII Europe, a period which he describes as "a time of darkness". A sense of unease pervades the work, though it is not without a wonderfully dry and deadpan humor. With his pieces titled "Adaptives", West invites the viewer to experience the work in an unusual way. During the BMA's show, visitors could pick them up and try them on for size. Though they serve no specific utilitarian purpose, each adaptive offers the user the possibility of engaging physically with something usually off limits in museums: a work of art.
The show travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will open there in March. An excellent catalog is available titled FRANZ WEST: To Build A House You Start With The Roof, Work 1972-2008, by Darsie Alexander.

Purcell and projections at Joyce Soho

This weekend I got a chance to be part of a fun project at Joyce Soho in New York City. It was a workshop performance by Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects: a multimedia version of Dido and Aeneas, an opera by Henry Purcell. The story of the opera is excepted from the Aenied by Virgil, but Jody updated the setting and recast Dido and her lover Aeneas as a modern Hollywood supercouple, hounded and eventually separated by media moguls and paparazzi, instead of the gods of Mt. Olympus.

The production was unusual not only because of the updating, but Jody used live musicians on stage (sadly increasingly rare in dance performances these days): a small orchestra conducted from the harpsichord, plus a quartet of wonderful opera singers singing the lead roles, each of whom was mirrored by an equally wonderful principal dancer portraying the action simultaneously. Jody also created witty projections that played on the wall behind the dancers, as well as on their bodies as they moved about the stage.

The choreography was athletic, sensuous and funny, and the production really gave this baroque opera a fresh twist. Hopefully the piece will tour in the future. Road trip!

Here are some clips from the production...

And some upcoming projects by the Jody Oberfelder Dance Projects!

It was really an energizing and inspiring way to start the New Year. Cheers!

Composition, color and craftsmanship

Shelley Thorstensen - The Preponderance of Evidence
The Print Center
1614 Latimer Street
Philadelphia, PA

This was a show of prints on paper using various printing processes such as lithography, etching, screen printing and relief printing.


"Charge" silkscreen 7 x 10 inches

I'm still thinking about Shelley Thorstensen's work. My experience of seeing her series of framed prints spread across four walls of the room. I carefully looked at each print up close, engaging in the layers of color and form. I loved them. The layers. The subtle depth of color. The play of light. The outlines ~ the gentle repetition of the drawn lines, precise yet sensual. Wondrous moments of visual pleasure, upclose and personal with the detail. From further away the blocks of light or darkness take on larger, organic forms. The opening reception was on a freezing, rainy night and to feel the color and have that experience with the work was remarkable. I think Shelley's work is about process of making beautiful spatial images. This abstract, atmospheric world of warm hues was truly beautiful, visually and conceptually.

Upon more reflection because of writing this blog, I was thinking about my experience of standing in front of Shelley’s work. I was thinking about the physical form of the paper, the process the paper had been through the printing, Shelley’s craftsmanship, working the paper, printing process and the image, and the materials being inherent to the making of the image. It made me appreciate the prints in a way I hadn’t considered, as corporeal objects, and through this reflection, I couldn’t help but think of my own physicality, substance as a body standing in relation to the work. My body, my materiality vs the materiality of the work, and our temporality. Body to body.

"A lot of those songs were the response to what struck me as beauty, whatever that curious emanation from a being, or an object, a situation, or a landscape. You know, that had a very powerful effect on me, as it does on everyone. And I prayed to have some response to the things that were so clearly beautiful to me, and they were alive."

Leonard Cohen, from the film “I’m Your Man”