Tag: film

Carrie Schneider at Chart Gallery

Mariah Carey’s head dominates Carrie Schneider’s solo show at Chart Gallery in Tribeca; smiling and nodding, it is featured in a large 16mm color film projection, a still image and two impressively huge photos printed on paper rolls that total 400 feet in length.  Sampled from an interview in which Carey says in response to a question about Jennifer Lopez, ‘I don’t know her,’ Schneider’s work explores how a few seconds of footage can become a meme with an unending digital lifespan and how an evasion on Carey’s part resulted in a cascade of attention.  Schneider’s super-abundance of abstract imagery created via multiple exposures in a specially built camera generates its own kind of optical noise, a visual art parallel to celebrity culture.

Carrie Schneider, Voice’s Owner (I don’t know her), two unique chromogenic photographs made in camera, 20 x 4800 inches, installation dimensions vary, 2023.

Rosa Barba at Luhring Augustine Gallery

Rosa Barba’s ‘Language Infinity Sphere,’ a form created from old letterpress blocks now on view at Luhring Augustine’s Tribeca space, speaks with its circular form to the ongoing output of these blocks over the years. Other text-related work in the show includes handwritten words on a filmstrip that rotates around a lightbox cube and a 35mm film depicting images and text from the Library of Congress’ massive campus, the largest media archive in the world.  Language appears in unexpected forms in this show, even as marks on the landscape in a film showing disposal sites for radioactive material in the western U.S.  (On view through May 21st).

Rosa Barba, Language Infinity Sphere, lead letters on steel, unique, diameter 18 1/8 inches, 2018.

Broomberg & Chanarin at signsandsymbols.art

London and Berlin-based artists and photography professors Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s short film, ‘The Bureaucracy of Angels’ grabs the imagination immediately with an unlikely casting choice; the star of the show – a mechanical wrecking arm – makes a riveting appearance as a soulful ballad singer lamenting the pain of migration.  Currently available to watch via the Lower East Side gallery Signs & Symbols’ website, the piece’s premise is absurd but the effect is first mesmerizing, then moving.  Part destroyer, part guardian, the machine keeps watch over migrants being intercepted by rescue agencies before eventually wrecking boats abandoned by travelers who made it to Sicily.  (Available online at signsandsymbols.art through May 13th).

Broomberg & Chanarin, still from ‘The Bureaucracy of Angels,’ 2017.

Omer Fast at James Cohan Gallery

August Sander’s iconic ‘People of the 20th Century,’ a photographic project documenting the German people in the early 20th century is the starting point for Omer Fast’s ‘August,’ a captivating video imagining Sander’s haunted later years. Here, Fast restages Sander’s oft-reproduced image of young farmers as an opportunity to consider the photographer’s stagecraft. (On view at James Cohan Gallery through Oct 29th).

Omer Fast, still from August, stereoscopic film in 3D, 5.1 surround sound, duration 15:30 minutes, 2016.

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures

Press images of 1920s movie stars inspired Cindy Sherman’s latest body of work – photos of women who have aged out of the young starlet role but who still wear cupid lips, smoky eye shadow and wistful expressions. (At Metro Pictures in Chelsea through June 11th).

Cindy Sherman, Untitled, dye sublimation metal print, 70 ½ x 48 inches, 2016.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled, dye sublimation metal print, 70 ½ x 48 inches, 2016.