EUTOPIA

Numen/For Use

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Numen/For Use "Tape Tokyo 02" @ 2121 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use “Tape Tokyo 02” @ 21_21 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use
Tape Tokyo 02
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
by Exhibition Director, Naoko Aono
Tokyo, Japan [link]

Tethered and taught, 21,120 meters of tape stretch into a translucent organ, squeaking and groaning as squirming, curious museum goers crawl through its aortal expanses. Choosing populist excess –cheap tape and labor instead of high-end fabrication— allows patrons near familiarity, prompting magical wonder at the common’s transformative ability. Inside the womb, externalities of sight and sound muted, the individual is left to entertain the alien familiarity of an organic space, or retreat from such existentialism to our digital umbilicus as experiential intermediary. Externally, the blurred shadow’s peristaltic migration is regarded, jealously, as the latest morsel consuming a novelty.

~ Ryder Richards
all images by the author

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DPMT7

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DPMT7, Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh)

 

DPMT7
Un Teatro del Nuovo
Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnatti, OH [link]

Elevating the ubiquitous structures of urban construction, the semi-temporary systems of renewal become the allegorical model for a new norm. An opera of the common displaced within the institution inverts and dissolves the typical, reversing context of exterior (mundane) to interior (sacred) and allowing the secular elevation to the epiphanistic.
With an elevated singing platform, 360-degree video montage, and craggy lumber stelae the intent unfolds as a more delicate archeology where one engages ghosts of primal ritualization: a brief poetic, insane glorification of the nomadic, ever-present ignored… the laborious modern religious sacrifice performed for the city.

~ Ryder Richards
photos courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh) and the author

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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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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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Lygia Pape

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Theia 1 C (misspelling of Portuguese word for web), 1976-2004_  golden thread, nails, wood, lighting

 

Lygia Pape
A Multitude of Forms [link]
The Met Breuer, New York
Through July 27th, 2017

Theia 1 C (misspelling of Portuguese word for web)
[1976-2004]
golden thread, nails, wood, lighting

Ethereal golden rays appear and disappear just out of reach, offering an illusory promise of riches. Exploring the relationship between linear form and the body’s movement within space, Pape’s use of golden thread deceives with the semblance of fragility. Because Pape’s work is grounded in geometric abstraction, critics sometimes mistakenly relate her work to European modernism. Pape’s resplendent web is one of resistance, a beautiful and subtle trap defying European colonization of her country, (note the misspelling of the title) as well as political unrest within Brazil’s history. The contingent object’s illumination perseveres, claiming criticality despite subjugating powers.

~ Colette Copeland
photographs by the author

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Sean P. Miller

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sean-miller-themac_1-web

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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