Tag: photography

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

Mark Handforth’s latest solo show offers work that is both chic and out of fashion.  Bold new sculptures in his usual cheeky minimalist style are a big contrast to the ephemeral and intuitive artwork being championed in the major survey shows at the New Museum and Whitney right now.  Yet his best pieces combine monumentality with humor and whimsy to exert a sophisticated, mysterious charm.

Hugging the gallery building outside, an impossibly long-necked lamppost bent into a star shape extends its top around its base like a seductively crossed leg.  Inside, a similarly exploded sense of scale turns a long piece of rusty pipe, bent into a heart and dotted with colorful burning candles, into a towering declaration of love.  Whether the source is freshly mass-produced or just junk metal, Handforth’s amusingly capricious sculptures suggest evidence of a powerful unseen hand, a kind of giant Gabriel Orozco cum Boo Radley.

But when the readability of Handforth’s sculptures is too easy, as with the three pieces in the back gallery, it becomes clear why so many younger artists are rebelling against this sort of aesthetic.  A star with two broken tips dominates the room, and also appears on an announcement card for the show in which it is ironically depicted as standing in for Mammon, Lucifer’s demonic follower in Paradise Lost.  The piece’s lasting impression, however, like that of two snake-like coils of ropes and a light installation depicting a tumbleweed, is signature Handforth: made to please the eye and titillate with a knowing yet shallow allusions.

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

Given the impenetrable nature of Manfred Pernice’s work, you wouldn’t confuse him for an introspective soul. Despite its title, his latest show does little to change his trademark reluctance to communicate clear meaning. Instead, a mysterious centerpiece sculpture—emblazoned with unexplained dates, dotted with everyday objects and accompanied by giveaway pamphlets stamped DIARY#8212;tentatively suggests that experience is subject to many interpretations.

A few zones of fluorescent green and deep red on the central installation are among Pernice’s few concessions to aesthetic appeal. But for those willing to grasp for associations, a honeycombed-patterned platform suggests an after-hours cafeteria, while empty plinths evoke museum or trade-show displays. If those same pedestals could also be imagined as buildings in a model urban landscape, then a kid’s ball could be a stadium, while a tiny floral tile might be seen as a garden. Who’s to say?

Certainly not Pernice, whose “diaries” mix dates, texts and underwhelming photos of blurred or mundane scenes. One unremarkable photo of a man carrying a bag is captioned EXPRESS YOURSELF, while another image shows the artist with a glazed look in his eyes. Both touch on the challenges of being original, but beg the question of why Pernice can’t provide his audience a few more clues to understanding his work.

As if anticipating such criticism, a sculpture in the back gallery consists of nothing but empty boxes (for cookies, cigarettes, etc.), dated to create a chronicle of the artist’s activities. While appearing to go in a direction diametrically opposed to the rest of the show, it still maintains the same line that artistic identity is ultimately elusive.

For ‘Time Out New York’ Magazine

Mai-Thu Perret’s first solo exhibition in New York aims to mine past avant-garde movements for newly provocative images and ideas, but provides little of either.  What you do get are lots of arcane references underscoring the video, sculpture and diagrams.  Take for instance, the show’s centerpiece video of young female dancers in utilitarian garb which, according to Perret, is inspired by artist Varvara Stephanova’s set designs for Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi’s 1924 agitprop theater piece ‘An Evening of the Book.’ You wonder whether knowing any of this is worth the piece’s slim rewards.

The front gallery offers an oddball assortment of artworks, including a ball of neon tubing looks like a wadded up (rejected?) version of props the Geneva-based Perret has previously shown, a carpet with a Rorschach pattern and large wall diagrams of dance steps.  But nothing quite sums up the pointlessness of this show better than the eight gigantic, cardboard commas  – which tellingly resemble quotation marks – that line a wall leading to Perret’s take on Zhemchuzhnyi’s homage to revolutionary literature.

The same commas, along with a huge blank-paged book, appear in the video as part of a set, around which the aforementioned cadre of young women performs synchronized movements that see-saw between energy and lethargy.  Apparently unable to sustain the stamina to convert past ideology to present-day meaning, the characters convey the disappointing message that such attempts are better in theory than practice.