EUTOPIA

Tatzu Nishi

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Tatzu Nishi
“Capsule Hotel 21”
Grand Projects—How Far Will You Go?
21_21 Design Sight,
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GRAND PROJECTS: HOW FAR WILL YOU GO?
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
Tokyo, Japan [link]
Through October 1st, 2017

Constructing a capsule hotel in Ando’s elegant architecture, Nishi’s project transforms the public space into a semi-private space, raising questions about rising costs of real estate and the growing divide between middle and upper classes in Tokyo. His use of rudimentary, inexpensive materials and decision to leave the foam insulation seams visible, further contrasts the sleek, minimal gallery located in one of Tokyo’s poshest neighborhoods. Unlike many container hotel rooms that resemble refrigerated morgue drawers, Nishi’s pods are surrounded by glass and stunning views of the park with rates free of charge, if only for a short nap.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of Ryder Richards and the author

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Tom Sachs

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Tom Sachs
Tea Ceremony
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Sachs’ new focus, in coopting and hyperventilating the “religion” of the Japanese tea ceremony, manifests as highly American provisional approximations. Embodying the reductive apparatus of utilitarianism whereby traditional systems or concepts can become lightweight, cheap and nomadic embraces Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” or Venturi/Brown’s “Learning from Las Vegas” sign-as-system culture. Taken to insane levels of excess, one can track the adept’s passionate re-valuation through selective interpretation: a whisk becomes motorized = shortcut, while only one in one-hundred handmade bowls is acceptable.
This conversion to American systemic foibles dialogizes contradictory knowledge through subjective insight, allowing the possibility for rich, discursive reappraisal.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

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Alison Jardine

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Flood, 2017, cement with pigments, 23 X 23 X 6″

Alison Jardine
Objects From a Future Past
Erin Cluley Gallery, Dallas [link]
Sept. 9 – Oct.14, 2017

Alison Jardine has transitioned from rural to urban landscapes, from delicately painted twigs to delicately concrete-cast plastic bags. Her former rambles on ancient UK paths provided fallen tree-trophies. Walks on paved trails now reward the artist with contemporary Dallas artifacts, recovered flotsam and jetsam from congested run-off streams.

Colors, tones, and textures are mixed into the wet concrete itself, not applied later. The finished skin of each work weaves a density of surface, a unified consistency that penetrates the whole organic mélange.

Like excavated steles, Jardine’s iconic formats suggest emblematic associations, recalling ritualistic, semiotic shapes, votive amulets, or generational site-markers.

~ Thomas Motley
images courtesy of the artist

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Doug Aitken

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Doug Aitken
Electric Earth
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas [link]

Gloriously composed, the polished production of Aitken’s work is problematic. The mundane becomes transcendent, a sublimation of the common provoking a desire to romanticize the surreal playgrounds of parking lots, diners, deserts and seedy hotels. These overlooked, neglected fringes are made nostalgically beguiling. Simple, iconic phrases become alluring sculptures. Within this superficial world exists a provocation: a disproportionate ratio of seduction to content, granting the work optional profundity.

One may accept the dirt-glam fairytales of negligible morality as enchanting consumables, or optionally as subversive commentary on our pitiable desires fulfilled: another cultural megatexture mined for nostalgia and polished free of reality.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the author

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Sean P. Miller

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Sean P. Miller
Gazing Reflecting Unknown
The MAC, Dallas [link]

Miller embraces the uncertain aspects of a pitch dark space and offers three gauzy video-light sculptures as part spectacle, part funhouse in his new exhibition at the MAC. Between discovering what may or may not be the actual artworks, plenty of opportunities await to trip over building detritus that alternately lies in hidden piles or stray bits throughout the cavernous space of the old building. It is this hazard of the unknown, coupled with the dim, slinky shifts of light play in Miller’s obfuscatory pieces, that produces a threatening dimension, and subsumes the parts into a larger, more provocative gesamtkunstwerk.

~ Peter Bo Rappmund
images courtesy of the artist and The MAC

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Kathryn Andrews

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Bozo the Clown Runs for President, 1984 Photo: Larry Harmon Pictures Corporation

Kathryn Andrews
Run for President
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Juxtaposing objects from popular film culture with political images, Kathryn Andrew’s large-scale sculptural installations wryly examine the relationship between media culture and political power. Lethal Weapon/Oval Office features one of the actual guns from the 1987 film hidden inside a large polished steel cylinder resembling a garbage can. Peering into the “peephole” viewers encounter the barrel of a gun pointed directly at their foreheads. The sculpture reflects the viewer placing them inside the oval office. The gun is the least lethal weapon, rather the self-aggrandizing fame and ego necessary to assume political office becomes the danger with potential global repercussions.

~ Colette Copeland

photos courtesy of the author

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