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Jean-Michel Fouquet
Haim Chanin Fine Arts
By Joel Simpson
The ancient Greek word, Kaïros, is variously translated
as the “right or opportune moment,” “right
time or season,” “opportunity.” That Fouquet
chose to title this exhibition of photographs Kaïros
seems somewhat incongruous. The apparent subject matter of
his images consists of objects of indeterminate use, seemingly
rescued from miscellaneous storage in dingy, neglected spaces.
They evoke the detritus of abandoned warehouses before the
glass is swept up. What is opportune about this? As poetry,
however, this work invites the viewer to force implied meaning
through a keyhole of paradox, to discover a new truth that
the artist is aiming at.
The subjects: a short solid cylinder surmounted by a smaller
diameter cylinder that is hollow inside (Chien noir3 [Black
Dog 3]); two rounded coffin-like structures (conga drum cases?)
with metal bands around them and perhaps a lock hasp, against
an indifferently painted wall, with thin black strings wrapped
loosely around them (Chien noir 2); a football shaped object
(but is it flat?) suspended from a board by black strings,
some loose, some taught (Chien noir 1); very narrow stairways
in a closed-off room ending at a blank wall but with spot
illumination (Kaïros 6, 7 & 8); a figure (?) seen
from behind, dressed in a cloak that reveals no limbs, standing
in front of a wretched garden and a space covered in arcing
pencil strokes (Kairos 1-5); what look like two rigid halter
dresses standing by themselves, straps in the air (Ordalie
1 [Ordeal in the archaic judicial sense, suggesting a torture
device]).
Fouquet’s confected proto-photographs evoke artifacts
of an earlier culture, mechanized, but much simpler, just
a generation or two old, resting undisturbed for years. Of
course, Fouquet has made them himself. And he employs a technique
of overpainting that mostly obscures their naïve cardboard-glue-and
string constitutions. But he has turned this necessity into
a virtue: by playing on the ambiguities of medium (are they
photographs or drawings?), time (how long ago were they created?),
and scale (how big are they?), he forces us to look at them
as purely visual objects within the context of a tangibly
musty atmosphere. We can’t identify them: Fouquet plays
on their enigmatic nature, giving us tantalizing titles that
hint at possible metaphors or symbols. Are they even photographs?
The power of these images is that they defy concept, yet
they are so constructed in their composition as to transfix
the eye, with their highly modulated geometry. Yes, the underlying
geometrical simplicity makes it easy to take them in, while
the heavily layered atmosphere rewards with textural nuance.
But what about theme? What is Fouquet getting at with these
images? Considered in the context of our own image-saturated
culture, these pictures fall at opposite end of the axis:
His fictional apparatuses of archaic Ordeals may twit us with
a dose of irony for our willingness to subject ourselves to
the ordeals of maintaining our computers, printers, cell phones,
and other devices that we have become so thoroughly dependent
on. We gaze on these anti-glossy, anti-glamourous images with
longing, allowing them to cleanse our overstimulated frenetic
souls, that have already scarred up in defense against the
urgent marketing of our commercial culture. Their purity,
obscurity and ambiguity offer relief from the mind-numbing
obviousness of the appeals that shower us constantly. They
seem to have some power to anchor our sanity.
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Die Young, Stay Pretty
Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts
By Aimee Sinclair
In this Miami based summer group show dubbed Young Generation
3: Die Young, Stay Pretty, curator Jose Carlos Diaz assembles
a group of work centered around the theme of “youth.”
Inspired by the classic 1970s film Logan’s Run in which
a youth-obsessed society decrees that people over the age
of 30 must turn themselves in for expiration, Diaz’s
apparent intention was to offer some light tongue-in-cheek
summer fare.
But the show manages to strike a deeper chord by referencing
youth. Miami especially, can be worked into this allegorical
equation as a young art city. As such, the Logan’s Run
theme can be similarly applied to the production of art and
the shaping of artistic careers in Miami’s art scene.
The youth factor is often linked to a few salient Miami art
dealers who are closely connected to the New World School
of the Arts and have ties to local museums. The New World
School consists of both a high school and a college, hence
the young ages of the alumni. Often the perception about town
is that these dealers are responsible for directing and shaping
the careers of young artists from the “inside”
while they are still in school. Many in the local arts community
view this relationship as paternalistic vis-à-vis the
“manufacturing” of art careers. Simultaneously,
due to their youth (many artists are in their early-twenties),
they are subject to falling prey to the one hit wonder artist
syndrome in which, by their mid-twenties, they struggle to
break out of the mold they are known for. This has in fact
resulted in what some view as a lack of growth in the work
of some of the most notable Miami art scenesters.
Hence the work in this show explores the notion of having
an art career both before and beyond one’s prime; the
notion of one’s prime or optimum period is of course
contestable and purely subjective. Miami’s duality,
both as a tropical harbinger of natural beauty and one of
plastic excess, produces something of an alternative reality.
The mixed media works here do not allow for typecasting.
Rather, they are compelling in the sense that they aspire
to incorporate time or the brevity of one’s presence
in a particular space. Yet the show doesn’t suspend
time; the essence of time is seen, felt and heard.
Each artist manifests this distinctly. In the work of Michael
Scoggins there is a foreboding sense of gloom embedded within
the doodling of a Marvel comics character obsession. Erica
Magrey’s video, Favorite Song: Sam, brings the boredom
of youth to the fore as a young girl dances to an extremely
arduous techno beat. Both Scoggins and Magrey reach back in
time, drawing on themes of early childhood. Sculpture pieces
by Felice Grodin and Luis M. Alonzo-Barkigia embody a ruin
and a remnant. Grodin’s piece, titled Blood Meridian
suggests an anthropomorphic slaughter of sorts that grows
out of the wall of a building ruin and encroaches upon the
space. It is simultaneously tragic and funny. Alonzo-Barkigia’s
piece, Plymouth, seems a comical remnant of the 1990s youth,
in which layers of punk music posters and urban graffiti have
been ripped from a building. Vicenta Casan’s photographs
hover somewhere in the middle, a mobius strip of motion photography
between a father and son. Lastly, the large-scale drawing
of a skull by Manny Prieres offers a relic, albeit just the
bones, aptly titled, Left behind.
The artists in this show give lie to the picture postcard
view of Miami as an idealized landscape, by offering up a
mixed bag of incongruity. These time portraits, if you will,
succeed in escaping causality. An acute awareness of mortality
pervades much of this work. Die Young, Stay Pretty, like the
lyrics it was inspired by, “Are you waiting for the
reaper to arrive? Or just to die by the hand of love? Love
for youth, love your youth.” attaches meaning to an
otherwise blasé snapshot of Miami’s fledgling
art scene and environs; a place in which aesthetics both natural
and man-made are triumphantly co-dependent.
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All You Desire
P.P.O.W. Gallery
By Mary Hrbacek
Curated by Jason Murison, this abstract group show, All You
Desire, epitomizes the appeal of flash that resonates with
universal power from the “animal kingdom” to humans.
These works focus unabashedly on shallow surface glitz and
glamour, but this is the beginning, not the end of the narrative.
Beneath the squirm, flash, beads, lights, and baubles, lies
the genesis of form, the source from which life gets the go-ahead
signal to recreate. While many of the works do not coagulate
into clearly organized structures, this display of inchoate
objects allows the viewer to engage them on a pre-cognitive
level.
The curator’s premise that new uses for design-based
materials are an “affectation” of artists, who
are influenced by a presumed consumer culture’s unrelenting
marketing techniques, makes a point that overlooks the genesis
of creativity, a colliding conflagration of inspiration and
cultural influences.
What seems to matter here is that these industrial design
materials are transformed into the realm of art that transcends
function.
Prudencio Irazabal’s striped painting, Untitled, 2003,
is mottled with shadows and is soft around the edges cum Mark
Rothko. Noah Sheldon’s Wall Section with Lights, 2007,
displays colored fluorescent lights peeping through a pastel
pegboard, hardly a utilitarian item. Laura Ribol’s Sinister/Dislocator,
2005, a single channel video with sound, records an indeterminate
squirming black rubber form on a flat bright pink ground,
whose motions recall modern dance movements. In the sculptural
floor piece, Gold Litany, Litany Foiled, 2007, Anna Betbeze
juxtaposes faux gold balls with fake fur and marbles, in an
eye-catching artificial nest-like array. Alyson Shotz’s
hanging piece, Small Universe, 2007, features glass beads,
lenses, wire, and other plastic media in a glitzy linear,
science oriented abstraction. Liam Gillick’s super-ethereal
floor piece, Dispersed Discussion Structure, 2006, suggests
a new use for whiskey by mixing it with glitter and sprinkling
it onto the floor of the gallery. Exclusive Lighting, 2007,
a digital video by Anne Eastman, catalogues a dizzying array
of garish Italian chandeliers viewed up-close and at a distance
in a lighting store in New York’s Little Italy.
This exhibition presents, if you will, an updated look at
an L.A. abstract art movement of the 1960’s, “Fetish
Finish,” in which brightly colored industrial materials,
combined with simple hard-edged forms, mirrored the flashy
surface appeal of popular objects, from cars to surfboards.
These works in All You Desire offer a softer, more reticent
vision that brings a functional object, such as a pegboard
or a minimal striped painting on canvas, into that indefinable
realm of poetic lyricism.
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