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General arts and culture posts

Sara Mejia Kriendler’s The Anthropocene at A.I.R. Gallery

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Installation view of Sara Mejia Kriendler’s exhibition The Anthropocene. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Closing this week, Sara Mejia Kriendler’s exhibition at A.I.R. gallery in DUMBO is a measured, evocative approach to humanity’s place in the world and to waste. Distinguished from the other two shows up at A.I.R. by the careful palette, here shades of ocher, mint, and rose accent neutral whites. Kriendler’s exhibition is titled The Anthropocene, a controversial scientific term for our current age based on our perceived impact on the planet. The artist uses detritus such as plastic packaging, styrofoam, and plaster to create fragmentary leftovers, seemingly crumbling with age. Yet these are clearly contemporary materials. Intimate in scale, the works still evoke grand themes of geologic time.

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Installation view of Sara Mejia Kriendler’s exhibition The Anthropocene. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

In the midst of these environments and altars, female forms appear. The installation In Line for the Shrine features white plaster female figures on a green foam altar backed by slabs of white styrofoam. These leaning white rectangles display fossil-like patterns, slashes, and the occasional whole form, such as that of a bird. The materials are interesting not only for the ecological concerns they recall, but in their fragility. Altars are typically made of durable material. On the other hand, the styrofoams and many plastics we use today are not recyclable and will outlast us. In Line for the Shrine, like other works in the show, plays with scale in that it renders the monumental on a diminutive scale and the human as dwarfed by its surroundings.

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Detail, In Line for the Shrine. Photograph my own.

Kriendler is currently a Fellowship Artist at A.I.R. Gallery. The Anthropocene is up at A.I.R. Gallery through May 31st. More detail shots below.

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Fluxus & Commerce: Frieze Art Fair’s Tribute to “Flux-Labyrinth”

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A plain plywood door was the mysterious entrance that fair-goers recently waited patiently for, at Frieze Art Fair’s reenactment of the original immersive environment conceived by Fluxus founder George Maciunas in 1975 (check out photos of the realized 1976 labyrinth here). Maciunas asked artists to contribute ideas for Flux-Labyrinth that created a series of obstacles and blockages that the participant would have to overcome to continue on in the maze. This version at Frieze brought together artworks old and new. Amidst the commercial spectacle of Frieze, Flux-Labyrinth offered a bodily, rather than visual, opportunity to experience art that was not for sale. Despite the menacing waiver, this project was popular enough to draw long lines of people both the Friday, May 16 and Saturday, May 17 that I visited.

Just what were some of these obstacles? Well….

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First, one had to figure out how to open a door…not as straightforward as it sounds when the knob is altered on the other side…

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Before long a professional gentleman offered you an absurd form that he promptly stamped and shredded (Amalia Pica’s A bureaucratic obstacle)….

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There were some awkward steps (George Maciunas, Shoe Steps) …

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As well as Foam Steps and Slipper Steps (also by Maciunas)…

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Then, there was a piano (Nam June Paik, Piano Activated Door). I played Chopsticks.

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Large rubber bands followed by Ay-O’s Brush Obstacle…

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A ball pit (Ay-O, Balloon Obstacle), and here things were starting to get rowdy…

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Lastly, there was a room full of strange machines, tubes, and sounds that opened onto…

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This grinning gentleman and five others, clad in wigs, gold hotpants and plastic tubing, whom I had to brush past to exit the labyrinth.

John Bock’s Sweat Production No. 9a thus offered the fairgoer a particularly memorable experience that certainly counter-acted much of the passive viewing that is the typically fair experience. Consider the disjunction between the site of this Flux-Labyrinth and the words of Fluxus’s first manifesto of 1963, which read: “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional and commercialized culture; Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art—PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM!'” Playful and certainly not precious, this Frieze Project felt like a homeopathic remedy to the crush of commodity fetishism and fashion outside.

 

Review on Burnaway: A “Cryptophonic” Sound Art Event

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Sacred Harp singing by Jesse P. Karlsberg and Sacred Harp singers at "The Cryptophonic Tour" at Oakland Cemetery on May 2, presented by the collective Callosum.

Sacred Harp singing by Jesse P. Karlsberg and Sacred Harp singers at “The Cryptophonic Tour” at Oakland Cemetery on May 2.

“Imagine 11 graveside sound art installations, four musical performances, three graveside chats, one continuous Widow’s Walk performance, and five hours in which to see it all. This was the scene at Atlanta’s historic Oakland Cemetery on Saturday, May 2. A crowd of art lovers, babies and dogs in tow, came to see and hear “The Cyptophonic Tour” in the cemetery’s 48-acre “rural garden.” The event, which received funding from Idea Capital, was an audiophile’s dream orchestrated by the sound art group ROAMtransmissions, a project of Atlanta’s Callosum Collective. ROAMtransmissions curated the content and co-produced it with Arts at Oakland, a new annual arts day series at Oakland Cemetery, long a venue for historical tours and lectures—as well as burials.”

Using Oakland Cemetery’s archives and audio collected on the cemetery’s grounds as source material, ROAMtransmissions’ artists presented immersive performances and installations that recounted various narratives about Oakland’s occupants. Head over to Burnaway Magazine to read my review of this sound art event here.