FIONA TAN – GHOST DWELLINGS

Posted on 2015-07-20

Fiona Tan has transformed the gallery at Soho Square into something resembling a lived-in space. It might be the home of a rather eccentric recluse, or even a squat. The absent inhabitant seems to be a hoarder who is both obsessive and neat, messy and chaotic. This highly personal place would appear to be both shelter and laboratory. The presence of its unknown protagonist surrounds the viewer, creating a slippage from filmic to material space.

Within this environment Tan has placed three new film pieces, originally commissioned by the Kunstzone of the Rabobank Nederlands for her exhibition Options and Futures and shot in locations in the USA, The Republic of Ireland, and Japan. At a time which historians have described as an age of ‘rolling catastrophe,’ each film examines our epoch from a certain standpoint. In these places decay and devastation are painfully visible; Detroit, a flourishing city that slowly slid into bankruptcy, Cork, where, as a result of the financial crash of 2008, vast complexes of ‘luxury’ housing were abandoned sometimes even before completion, and Fukushima, where the fast and merciless devastation by both earthquake and tsunami, was compounded by radioactive fall-out. Whilst the visitor is invited to choose a path and narrative within these particular rooms, Tan’s camera searches among the piles of rubble for the building blocks of something new, for some kind of aftermath.

Exhibition runs through to August 1st, 2015

Frith Street Gallery
17-18 Golden Square
London
W1F 9JJ

www.frithstreetgallery.com

   Tweet

T. KELLY MASON

Posted on 2015-07-20

With a background in music and poetry, T. Kelly Mason’s visual vocabulary is both spare and expressive, uncovering meaningful associations between seemingly disparate elements. For over two decades, Mason has produced work across a range of media, including sound, video, installation, painting, and sculpture, addressing the relationships between reality, perception, representation and interpretation. In his current exhibition, Mason uses these relationships as lenses to examine dichotomies of scale: internal vs. external, human vs. cosmic, actual vs. imagined.

One of Mason’s new works depicts Barnett Newman’s The Wild, now in MoMA’s permanent collection, as seen at the Betty Parsons Gallery. When this tall slender painting was first exhibited by Parsons in 1951, its peculiar stature bewildered and intrigued viewers. Measuring 8 feet tall by only 1.5 inches wide, The Wild commands attention and engages active viewership with its human-like uprightness and more-than-human height. Indeed, the scalar relationship of the artwork to the viewer was of primary importance to Newman who claimed, “Size doesn’t count. It’s scale that counts. It’s human scale that counts… One of the nicest things anyone ever said about my work… is that when standing in front of my paintings that you had a sense of your own scale.” Mason preserves this effect by re-creating through paint and collaged lighting gels The Wild in its life-size proportions. Moreover, he references the work’s figurative scale – and its importance to art history – by illustrating it in the hallowed and sometimes harrowing 21st-century flow of information and ideas.

Opposite – KeyHole Satellite USA-161 (Conceptual Rendering-Actual Photos of USA-161 are Classified) Nile River Twilight, 2015

Exhibition runs through to August 1st, 2015

Cherry and Martin
2712 S. La Cienega Blvd / 2732 S. La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034

www.cherryandmartin.com

   Tweet