EUTOPIA

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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PLURAL: Doris Salcedo

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Doris Salcedo
Plegaria Muda
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Meticulously crafted, long, narrow, wooden tables topped with earth and another upended table crowd the gallery. Viewers carefully wind their way through the maze-like, sacred space. The intimate proximity to the sculptures prevents distant, passive viewing. Sparse, straggly shoots of green grass sprout from the tabletops. Resembling coffins, the installation references the thousands of youth killed on the streets of L.A., as well as youth murdered by the military in Colombia. Rather than a somber memorial focusing on the dead, the grass symbolizes resilience and perseverance. Plegaria Muda, translated as “silent prayer,” suggests hope and a collective call to witness.

~ Colette Copeland

Conflating poetics with the politics of victimization Salcedo contextualizes her work with exhumation of the dead. Metaphorically and literally fecund, the dark platitude of survival through hardship physicalizes loss as symbolic graveyard. Plegaria Muda references Columbian youths found in mass graves, while mentioning 10,000+ youth deaths on the streets of LA. Disturbingly, the work offers no specific voice to the victimized voiceless of LA, relying on its powerful, universal vagueness to co-opt any tragedy. From a stratospheric art career the strategic franchising of the distant dead becomes questionable as empathy, yet highly valuable as cultural capital.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Colette Copeland

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Ann Veronica Janssens

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Ann Veronica Janssens

Ann Veronica Janssens “Blue, Red and Yellow” 2001_ Courtesy of the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles, Photo by Kevin Todora

 

Ann Veronica Janssens
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]
January 23, 2016 – April 17, 2016

Experiential works, such as Janssens’ fog room or layered cubes, require little or no explanatory text to engage. The optical spectacle triggers a digital image impulse: documentary investigatory tourism is the mass socio-cultural statement. However beautiful, stunning and wordless the work, sustained consideration reveals a Kantian knot of perceptual inquiry. Made of relatively humble materials the work exemplifies a proletariat modernism –“it is what it is”— while simultaneously mystifying the common through sublime transmutation. By questioning how one perceives a loop of self-reflective inquiry prompts reconsideration of correlative objectivity, forcing re-engagement with the world as potentially unknowable and profoundly mystical.

~ Ryder Richards
photos by Kevin Todora, courtesy of the artist, 1301PE, Los Angeles and Nasher Sculpture Center

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