Category Archives: exhibition

Lights! Camera! Philippe Parreno at Park Avenue Armory

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When you have a 55,000 square-foot exhibition hall like the Park Avenue Armory, you’ve got a lot of space to play with. French artist Philippe Parreno does so with some very beautiful lighting in a loosely timed exhibition structure that works as a conceptual frame for recent films. It feels like entering the belly of a mechanical, glammed-up 42nd-street-in-the-1950s whale. Neither it–nor that metaphor–are exactly coherent, but at least “H(n)ypn(y)osis” is fascinating to behold. Screens whir and click, pianos tinkle, music becomes drowned in ocean waves or city street noise (literally being pumped in from the outside streets), marquees blink, blinds shut, screens light, and bleacher seating begins its infinitely slow twirl.

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Installation view, visitors in front of piano playing itself

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Installation view during a lull in activity

Inside this vast space, the visitor is free to move about as he or she chooses. While something of an open-ended system of parts, moments of focus have been clearly selected. When I was there, two child actors entered together, drawing attention as they robotically began identical monologues in opposite parts of the vast hall, reciting dialogues from the perspective of Ann Lee, a Manga character Parreno ‘copyrighted’ years ago (this work is the result of a collaboration with Tino Sehgal). And of course, when the room darkens and a screen lights up, the crowd drifts toward it like a sea of minnows.

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The contents of the films and their tone varied–from a realistic meditation of the crowd that mirrored our positions as viewers in the audience to the imagined animated monsters of a young boy in Chinatown. The other films by Parreno on view are an animated manga version of Ann Lee talking to the viewer, a train ride mimicking that taken by the corpse of Robert Kennedy in 1968, and an uncanny reenactment of Marilyn’s life in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, which you gradually realize is being told not through her eyes but those of a machine.

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Installation view

That machine is the camera, ever-present in the exhibition as a whole. Parreno harps on the apparatus or lens by which the whole smoke-and-mirrors routine of film, and more largely of art, is made possible throughout–for example, in the exposed bulbs and wiring, the mechanical noises, and the simple drama of the lights going up and the show being over.

Up for one more week–through August 2. Make sure to allow yourself two hours to really see all of the different aspects of the exhibition. More images below.

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Installation view of video Anywhere Out of the World (2000)

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Installation view of film Marilyn (2012)

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Installation view of film Marilyn (2012)

Amerikka: Cildo Meireles at Galerie Lelong

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Amerikkka, 1991/2013

Next week is your last chance to Cildo Meireles’s exhibition at Galerie Lelong in Chelsea. In it, the Brazilian artist’s show-stopping installation Amerikkka draws you into the main gallery space where a rectangle of poised gold bullets loom over a field of pristine white eggs. The eggs are plaster and intended to be walked on. Entering the space between these opposed forces, the threat of bullets overhead and the uncomfortable sensation of walking on eggshells below, puts the viewer in a fragile, vulnerable position. The viewer is a stand-in for society at large, as the title suggests by merging the words “America” and “KKK” (Klu Klux Klan).

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The visual appeal of long, perfectly rows of small things draws one in. Given the solid plaster nature of the eggs, the sense of threat is somewhat stymied. The tilt of bullet-ridden ceiling could be opening up, or clamping down. Is the KKK a current or past threat, something beginning or ending, or per the title, embedded unavoidably in ideas of America? Recent events incline me to the latter interpretation.

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The other works on view are more playful, even when they also reference social problems, such as the recent work Aquaurum. Encased in a vitrine are two tall identical glasses–one filled with water and one filled with gold. Meireles refers to water shortages in São Paulo inn this piece, but it could also be read in terms of duality and the philosophy of perception.

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Pares impares, 2011/2013

Themes of duality and perception are evidenced in the two large rectangles of starkly different content in Amerikkka, but also in works like Pares ímpares(2011/13), where two sets of identical glasses lay in a vitrine, with cracked lens on one side lit from below like spiderwebs.

Cildo Meireles’s exhibition is up through June 27.

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All in the Eyes: Laurie Simmons at the Jewish Museum

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Installation view of Laurie Simmons: How we See at the Jewish Museum

Installation view of Laurie Simmons: How We See at the Jewish Museum

It’s all in the eyes. The exhibition Laurie Simmons: How We See at the Jewish Museum, on view through August 16, features large-format glamour shots of professional models. With careful lighting and glowing color background, these are clearly staged representations of beautiful young women, just as you might see in a magazine advertisement, but larger. These headshots tower over the viewer at 70 inches high, adding to the impact when you gradually realize that the eyes are a little…off. It’s disturbing. As I stood there, I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why the eyes were strangely textured for at least two minutes. Then a lightbulb went off: the eyes of the model were shut and the lid painted to resemble an eye.

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How We See/Lindsay (Gold) (2015)

Simmons describes being interested in “doll girls,” women who make themselves up to resemble dolls, but that is almost the least interesting of the implications that these visually-impaired subjects have. Given that the staring eyes of the model are blind, the title of the exhibition–“How We See”–takes on new meaning. The seeing party is us, the viewers, rather than the models. This system of gazes exposes the inherent dynamic between the viewer and every work of art. We look at the art, and are presented with the illusion of a person or world that could look back at us.

It also exposes a societal bias to consume women as images, without empowering them with the ability to return the gaze (and upset those power relations). The size of the images gave weight to those readings. Even monumentalized, the seemingly inanimate women remain only larger dolls to be looked at. I found the flashy smiles and glowing backgrounds quickly became monotonous, even boring. While strong individually, the repetition of the still, theatrical images in the exhibition turns the overall effect almost banal. I’m not sure whether this result intentionally mimics the source material of advertisements being evoked or if it is an unfortunate side effect.