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| Photo-topography, Carlos Garaicoa. Galleria Continua at the Armory Show 2012. |
It looked like styrofoam in person, but apparently artist Caralos Garaicoa transferred photographs to polyspan (I suspect a material a lot like styrofoam) to create these white images.
Garaicoa is a Cuban artist who tends to explore Cuba’s identity and politics through its buildings. These archetectural scenes were clearly composed, but the precision of them crumbles away as you look closer.
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| In the Garden, 2008 |
Atlanta has this interesting past that makes you want to dig deeper and understand what was once there, even though it may be covered…Sherman burnt down the city. They say when you want to get rid of something, you burn it, but you don’t really get rid of it. I can look out my back door and see a lot — Radcliffe Bailey via NY Times
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| Tricky, 2008 |
Bailey is maybe better know for a layering of imagery, culturally resonant materials, and text that began when he was given some old family photographs to work with. But looking at the images from the exhibition, I was really drawn to some of his more sculptural pieces, like Tricky, above. A textured black surface juxtaposed with the jaunty tilt of the hat encase a slave ship. In The Antelope, he again presents a black ship, this time encased in glass like a fossil and sailing over white cloth/paper.
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| The Antelope, 2010 |
The large installation Windward Coast creates a rolling ocean of piano keys harvested from some 400 pianos, suggesting the oceans traversed in the slave trade and in their midst a lone black head, the same glittery texture as the ship in Tricky, appears.
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| Detail view of Windward Coast |
The artist does not consider his work to be solely dark or only about slavery however (as you might not realize by the pieces I’m showing here). Regarding Windward Coast, he told the New York Times, “I think about all the music that was probably played on those keys. An ocean is something that divides people. Music is something that connects people. Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk — it’s a different sound that takes you somewhere else. It’s also about being at peace.”
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| Installation View, Memory as Medicine at the High Museum |
More about the exhibition here and images of the artist’s work here.
The doppelganger is an always unsettling idea. While today you might use the word to refer to a double or lookalike, historically a doppelganger represented evil and misfortune in a paranormal form and seeing a doppelganger almost always conincided with an unfortunate event. Swiss artist Cornelia Hediger tackles the darker connotation in her current show up at Klompching Gallery in Brooklyn.
Hediger constructs complex narratives in this set of photos featuring two women posing together in different ways. These colorful and rich images suggest a narrative with a cast of two, or perhaps one, characters whose relationship is ambiguous and darkly suggestive.
I love how she distorts perpective in these photos, so that above the woman in pink appears much small than the woman in black, and below the bed makes them both appear tiny.
I really enjoyed them, but as I viewed one after another I began to feel they were overly staged. There were so many props that the models enagaged with, when often their body language was the most telling and real part of the photo.
More images and exhibition details here. Cornelia Hediger is up at Klompching Gallery through October 21.