EUTOPIA

Janet Cardiff

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Janet Cardiff
Forty Part Motet (2001) [link]
Tate Modern, London, U.K.

Sitting in a dimly-lit room with tears streaming down my face, I stand and walk around the circle of 40 speakers, pausing before each to listen to the Salisbury Cathedral Choir sing in Latin– Spem in Alium, (16th century music by composer Thomas Tallis). The chorus creates a cacophony of need, slowly dialing into individual yearning as one moves throughout the space. The sound shifts, reverberating throughout the cavernous architecture. Unlike a musical performance, Cardiff allows the viewer to choose the level of experiential engagement—whether to be passive or active. Similar to Cardiff’s well-known audio walks, this meditative sculptural soundscape transports to an interior world full of primal longing.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Haris Epaminonda

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Installation view: Haris Epaminonda, Vol. XXII, Aspen Art Museum, 2017. Photo Credit: Tony Prikryl

Haris Epaminonda
Vol. XXII
Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado [link]
March 10 – May 28, 2017

Haris Epaminond’s Vol. XXII challenges classic Western logic, proffering a recontextualized, non-linear perspective towards overlapping histories of civilizations. Spanning centuries, the minimal elements become artifacts inextricably essential to a larger, contemporary ethos based in art and architecture. The physical objects manifest memories from expanses of various Mediterranean and Asian identities, simplified to dominant typologies like encyclopedic chapters. Truncated columns, fractured marble, frescoed walls, vases, and symbolism allude to specific cultures while remaining tacitly universal and innately human. These parallel spaces are strung together, reflecting onto each other by mirrors throughout the gallery in the construction of this newly discovered place.

~ Jake Weigel
Photos: courtesy of Aspen Art Museum, 2017. Photo Credit: Tony Prikryl

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Louise Lawler

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Louise Lawler
Why Pictures Now [link]  (through July 30th, 2017)
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Thirty years after her first show at MoMA, Louise Lawler continues to challenge the notions of authenticity, authorship and judgement by revealing the mechanics of art and its reception. The strategies of multiplication using mass culture, titling, cropping and reframing are still present, however in “Why Pictures Now” the show’s title not only serves as a supplemental mirror image of art in the age of digital production, in referencing an earlier work it acts as -or enacts- an inside out installation effectively producing a reversal where the viewer in her contingent role as co-author retraces and reframes the work.

~ Ali Soltani
images courtesy of MOMA and Soltani+LeClercq

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Henrik Vibskov

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Henrik Vibskov
“Performing Fashion”
fashion after Fashion [link]
Museum of Arts & Design, New York, NY [link]

In 2015, fashion forecaster Li Edelkoort pronounced that fashion was dead, “a ridiculous and pathetic parody of what it has been.” Exemplified in Vibskov’s technically wearable apparel, his unwieldy and constrictive cherry-bomb red sculptures resemble sexy alien blobs. The amorphous, testicular sculptures are suspended in cage-like structures: an external frame substituting for the absent, skeletal, human model. A monitor plays a performative video of actors wearing the garments while walking through a nighttime landscape, moving in and out of an illuminated, glowing structure. Seductive and absurdist, the sculptures satirize the heroin-chic body image with bulky, flopping, nodules of excess.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Marisa Merz

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Living Sculpture, 1966, Aluminum

Marisa Merz
The Sky Is A Great Space
The Met Breuer, New York [link]

Does the exhibition title refer to the five decades of Merz’ work as the sole female artist in the Arte Povera movement? Or perhaps to the long-overdue recognition of her work’s significance? Or conceivably a reference to her organic aluminum1960’s Living Sculptures, which resemble polymorphic alien life forms? Merz transforms ordinary materials (both domestic and industrial) into extraordinary explorations of geometries and spacial relationships. Her sculptures defy easy categorization, fluidly moving between the personal/intimate to the monumental, between minimal and obsessively detailed. Despite the confines of gender and domestic obligations, not even the sky limited Merz’ prodigious and creative talents.

~ Colette Copeland
photographs courtesy of the author

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John Hejduk

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John Hejduk
Jan Palach Memorial [link]
Cooper Union, New York

House of Suicide and House of Mother of Suicide

As architectural meditations, John Hejduk’s constructions are uncharacteristically rootless- tentative inhabitants that stir a moment till eternity, elusive appearances that despite their eventual departure, are forever marked in memory. Inspired by David Schapiro’s poem, two spiky structures at a distance mark an immutable act – paying tribute to Jan Palach who in 1968 set himself on fire in protest of the Soviet’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, and to his mother. Concurrently, against a newly deleterious milieu imbued by demoralizing declarations of intolerance, they are the incarnated spirit of freedom; and in New York, finally, a binding reminder of events and memorial.

~ Ali Soltani

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