janeil engelstad Archives

Ed Atkins
Ribbons
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London [link]
June 11 – Aug 25, 2014

Careening around Ribbons is an immersive experience that fulfills like the sickest amusement park ride- thrills and chills, but no plunging depths. Projected throughout the gallery is “Dave”, a buff, gloomy computer generated avatar reciting cryptic verse, singing melancholic songs and scrawling messages of alienation on his body while drinking himself into a stupor, a uniquely human existential quandary. Panels with scribbled drawings and enigmatic text add ambiguity. Yet, like self-absorbed Dave, the installation is intoxicating, nauseously pulling us in and pushing us out in the same breath; smart-phone captivating and eerily prescient of an increasingly shallow technologic future.

~Janeil Engelstad

photo by Janeil Engelstad

Rebecca Carter
sleep architecture and the dream house
RE gallery + studio, Dallas [link]
March 21- April 20, 2014

Harmony and disorder, stillness and agitation, elegance and mess are recurring dualities in Rebecca Carter’s work. Her alluring thread drawings -lines of text from conversations and dreams, brainwaves, golden rings, and fragments of houses lived in- touch the place where our own self-recognition rests. Uncomfortable, vulnerable, at times winking with humor, she constructs domiciliary spaces that rattle memories of people, events and place. Like the lines in an Emily Dickinson poem, an Agnes Martin painting, or the horizon at dusk, Carter’s work beckons meditation and then, tension, as if she wishes to insist that dreams, homes, nothing, can protect us.

~ Janeil Engelstad

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