Tag Archives: Georgia Museum of Art

Review: Bernd Oppl at the Georgia Museum of Art

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Bernd Oppl, Sick Building, 2012; video (still).

A new review of mine about the quietly horror-inspired videos of Austrian artist Bernd Oppl is up on Burnaway Magazine. If you have the chance to visit the Georgia Museum of Art before September 16th, the three videos form a really interesting, only slightly unsettling, exhibition.

“Inhabited” is usually a reassuring word. The works in “Bernd Oppl: Inhabited Interiors” at the Georgia Museum of Art, however, beg the unsettling question: who, or what, is inhabiting these interiors? Three short works—Flock, Hotel Room, Sick Building—by the Vienna-based artist are being screened in silent rotation, none of which depict a human presence. According to curator Laura Valeri, the artist considers the spaces themselves as the protagonists. Continue…“

 

Mind the Machine

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Tristan Perch is currently on his second large wall drawing at the Georgia Museum of Art. Three drawings will stretch across one long white hallway on the second floor of the museum. When the third, final drawing is finished on September 3, 2014, the wall will be painted over. In the meantime, the wall is being drawn on not by Perch’s hand, but by a machine holding a pen. Perch programmed the machine to move around the wall to create this drawing as the pen in weighted down by a clip and gravity from a long wire. The artist, who also works in electronic sound art, is interested in the balance and interaction between the code (his program for the pen’s path on the wall) and physics (how it actually manifests in the environment). It certainly takes automatic drawing to the next level, although rather than stemming from the unconscious this stems from a programmed computer chip.

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Little Grand Canyon Yellow: Earth Pigments from Places

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Called Little Grand Canyon Yellow, this 1964 painting by Howard Thomas is hung next to a vitrine of small, re-purposed glass jars at the Georgia Museum of Art. The title of the work was intended literally. The artist made the yellow pigment from earth from the Grand Canyon. Perhaps it is not coincidental this painting preceded the earthworks of Robert Smithson and Ana Mendieta of the 1970s.  Although still on canvas, Thomas engages with site through the locally sourced pigment that are referenced in the title. The style of the work, however, rather than being a fragmented areal view, seems to me more like formalist play because of the  centered shapes bounded by the canvas, suggesting no expansive horizon, and the disjointed layerings that creates a tone-on-tone sense of motion or depth.

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The glass jars showing Thomas’s pigments have fascinating labels, like the one below labelled “Frat House.” What kind of painting might that have been used in versus the one above, I wonder.

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