EUTOPIA

Pneuhaus

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Pneuhaus

Compound Camera
Inflatable Expanding Works of Art
Exploratorium, Pier 15 [link]
San Francisco, CA

A contemporary interpretation of ancient camera obscura technology, the design group’s work considers complexities of visibility and sight. Featuring 109 tiny lens embedded into an igloo-shaped structure, the environment offers a respite from the crowded pier, placing the viewer into a position of a voyeur. The field of vision is at once ruptured and expanded, providing many tiny screens of the same scene from a 360- degree upside-down vantage of the outside world. This expansion clouds rather than clears our vision, manfiesting John Berger’s dictum that what we see is never reconciled with what we know.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Diane Durant

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Diane Durant "Mental Pictures"

Diane Durant “Mental Pictures”

 

Diane Durant
Mental Pictures
Ft Worth Community Arts Center [link]
Ft. Worth, Texas

Questioning history and truth with more than a sly nod to theorists Derrida, Saussure and Sontag, Durant’s textual images belie easy consumption. Meticulously printed and framed, the photographs challenge the viewer to imagine their own pictures, as well as reconfigure assumptions about the function of an image and caption. Spare and lush, her prose reflects southern childhood experiences of wonder tinged with disappointment–the power of words to inspire and destroy. Yet the work transcends the personal; semiotics be damned, the language is coded with cultural nuances.  Butter Everything, Let It Melt and Because…reverberates as apt metaphors for our current political culture.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

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Luke Fowler

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Luke Fowler, amphitheatre at the Nasher

Luke Fowler, amphitheatre at the Nasher

Luke Fowler
Sightings: Luke Fowler
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]
Through August 19, 2018

Fowler created a dual, site-specific aural experience in the amphitheater garden of the Nasher and Lismore Castle Arts that reveals hidden histories of the institutions and the inner structure of their respective sculptural objects. Influenced by Minimalist Avant-Garde music and Fluxus, the sound work in Dallas functions as a liminal dialogue between two sculptures by Naum Gabo and Barnett Newman. By transforming the sculptural surfaces into a speaker, recording and synthesizing the sign waves, the resulting auditory action questions the notion of sculpture as a physical object, as well as how we perceive an acoustic composition within the spacial ecology of place.

~ Colette Copeland
all images courtesy of the author, save the Barnett Newman image

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Zoe Leonard

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Zoe Leonard: Survey
The Whitney, New York [link]
I want a president, 1992
Typewriting on paper

Although this work is the least assuming object in Leonard’s retrospective, it resonates with omnipotent irony to our current political culture. Originally written for QW, an independent queer magazine that folded before publication, Leonard’s letter was an inciteful/insightful call for a voice for the marginalized in the lead up to the Bush/Clinton/Perot election. Twenty-six years later and we still want. And our wants are blatantly ignored. And we are told that our wants are not important. And we still wonder why “always a john and never a hooker, always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.”

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of the author

 

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Tatzu Nishi

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Tatzu Nishi
“Capsule Hotel 21”
Grand Projects—How Far Will You Go?
21_21 Design Sight,
→
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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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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