Category: Reviews

For Flash Art

Vinogradov and Dubossarsky, known for their fantastical paintings of utopian scenes, composed a surreal celebration of ‘fun’ for their first U.S. solo show. ‘Our Best World’ started out in Moscow but quickly jumped to a flowery meadow full of picnickers and ended up in a surreal anti-gravity world of floating toys and cartoon characters. Each scene was a composite of half-recognizable advertising images presented in an uncritical fashion. Amongst images of handsome young people enjoying themselves sat Madonna, flanked by cute animals and a cherub. The Material Girl played Madonna of the Commodity, benignly blessing the marriage of mass marketing and kitsch and granting the most superficial wishes of the consumer.

The characters in ‘Our Best World’ are the picture of health, happiness and economic prosperity. But their innocent delight in the good life is a mirage – a utopia created by marketers. Critics have questioned the apparent lack of irony in Vinogradov and Dubossarsky’s paintings, and there is little in this installation that directly critiques consumerism. However, the context of the installation completes the meaning of the artwork. Three years ago, before the economic slump, the terrorist attack on New York and, more recently, war in Iraq, ‘Our Best World’ might have been read as pure celebration and kitsch. But in light of current events, the painting simultaneously exposes viewers’ uncomfortable familiarity with the barrage of media images and forces the contrast between the happy world presented and the reality of daily life.

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Two things become clear quickly. First, the architectural outlines, grids of color and areas of digitization look like direct quotes from popular contemporary painting. Second, the swirls of gold spray paint, recurring turquoise and purple colored shapes and the occasional v-shaped outline of a bird in flight are a conscious effort at bad taste. The paintings are a parable of taste gone berserk, of what might happen if a cosmic wind swept up the ‘high’ and ‘low,’ contemporary and dated, and blended them together in a chaotic swirl of signs.

This world without aesthetic law, is likened to the country’s current political and economic uncertainty in titles like, ‘Another Layer in the Conspiracy Theory’ and ‘White Collar Crime.’ Other titles refer to heavy drinking and pharmaceuticals, suggesting the extent to which ‘free-floating anxiety’ can take its toll. Abstract painting rarely tells such a clear story.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

As she ages, Goldin’s subjects remain young. Simon and Jessica, a sugary sweet young couple, who look and often pose like models, are the subject of a steamy shower scene. Clem and Jens star in a huge, nine panel sex scene. But couples with kids take over the show, with children often joining in post-coital cuddling. Goldin remains focused on documenting her adopted ‘family’ but in the year of her fiftieth birthday, she seems intent on reexamining the traditional, if somewhat updated, family unit.

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine

‘Meadowlands,’ is a group of 133 black and white photographs that was commissioned by Documenta XI. Presented in a compact grid, the photos formed one large composite that simulated the experience of seeing the Meadowlands as a series of glances from the Turnpike. Most photographs documented traces of a still active human presence: a memorial on a chain-link fence, a graffiti covered wall and a careful arrangement of truck storage containers along a canal. By contrast, the Butte series was a vision of advanced industrial decline. Shot on a hill near an abandoned pit mine, Ashkin’s subjects include a rusting basketball backboard, cracked building foundations and a lonesome bench next to an empty, six lane highway. Occasional disused mines appear in this series, but the focus is on the dilapidated housing and barren landscape of a dying neighborhood. Several shots were taken in or near the artist’s car, suggesting that he, too, would soon make his getaway.

In “Notes Toward Desolation,” a text recording Ashkin’s thoughts on post-industrial landscape, the artist characterizes Butte, the Meadowlands and Palm Springs as places where “…the frenzy of consumption has exhausted itself….” As a consequence, property owners make little effort to conform to landscaping ideals, ironically making these places attractive to the artist for what he calls their, “absence of false beauty.” The Meadowlands photographs document two worlds: one populated by truck drivers and gas station attendants by day, and one in which vandals and joyriders leave evidence of their activities under cover of night. Unlike Butte, which is desolate day or night, the Meadowlands series challenges viewers to see these landscapes not as industrial wastelands, but as sites free from rules imposed by urban planners and the arm of the law.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

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In ‘I Think It’s Time to Leave,’ a goofy looking figure of a goat’s head with blindfolded, gem shaped eyes and a flame coming out from under his chin seems to blast off from a ground composed of various geometric patterns. Splatterings of blood red paint dot the patterns, suggesting violence even if it’s not obvious what might have happened. This painting, with its clear differentiation between ground and sky, is one of the few that connects these paintings to Davis’ early work. ‘Who’s Asking Questions,’ on the other hand, enters a whole new dimension of space, with a mirrored ‘v’ shape dividing the canvas between top and bottom. A mask-like face dominates each sphere. Above, an indistinct, oval shaped face, outlined in wavy blue and red lines and framed by what looks like bloody gashes, peers down at a second visage, this one with distinct features composed of clear lines.

It’s unclear why these Janus faces are locked in confrontation, but this feeling of conflict comes across in nearly all of the new work. It’s a fight that seems to extend to the composition of the paintings themselves. As if from the tightly controlled blocks of seemingly random patterning, the creatures have managed to wrench themselves free, allowing abstraction and representation to go to war against each other. Under the spidery trace of a psychedelic, tie-died snowflake pattern that appears in some variation at least once in every painting, Davis expands to a cosmic stage where the fundamental oppositions of painting can battle it out alongside other masters of the universe.

For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

Tom Finkelpearl, the Museum’s new director, makes a point of avoiding competition with art venues in or near Manhattan. Instead of devising a counterpart to last year’s “Brooklyn!” show of young artists based in that borough, he and the other curators focused on the Museum’s unique selling point: the incredible cultural diversity of surrounding immigrant communities. The resulting exhibition featured artists from fifteen different countries and included work as diverse as Jaishri Abichandani’s small-scale photographs of young people in India and New York and thick oil paintings combining classical Chinese painting styles with the techniques of Van Gogh and Monet by Zhang Hongtu.

A slide projection of photographs by six different artists drove home the point that you don’t need to leave New York City to see the world. One highlight was Audrey Gottlieb’s shot of a Brahmin priest laying a stone statue of the elephant god in Flushing Meadows Lake, which looks like it could have been the bank of the Ganges. Elsewhere, Evie McKenna’s photos of quirky New York houses exemplify American outsider architecture and Gerard Gaskin’s photographic portraits of the residents of LeFrak City housing project lend a dignity to the sitters that belies the project’s rough reputation.

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The coyotes, desert loners but here assembled in an enormous pack, are survivors despite their lack of hair and skinny bodies. The man, on the other hand—ironically clad in fur—has fallen victim to icy northern temperatures. The installation’s design suggests that the ice on which he rests would gradually creep up over his body, reinforcing the idea that nature has taken control.

Expansion in all its forms produces unlikely neighbors, whether it’s pristine, white-walled galleries adjoining grimy auto body shops in Chelsea, or coyotes, bears and other animals rummaging through garbage cans in the suburbs. As Americans continue to expand their reach into the habitat of wild animals, the boundaries between civilization and the wild become blurred. Joo manages to subtly provoke viewers to question their assumptions about the mastery and adaptability of mankind as we play God with our environment.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

In a storm of hard driving, techno beats, Belgian electro-music band Front 242 chants these lyrics about a nighttime surveillance mission over Western Europe. “Circling Overland” is also the title of one of five new paintings by young German artist, Torben Giehler. In his second solo show at Leo Konig, Giehler presented two large-scale, digitized renditions of famous mountain peaks and three aerial views of fractured landscapes. Each of the latter has a title from a song by Front 242 or the British, post-punk band Joy Division.

In contrast to the dark force of European proto-techno, Giehler’s paintings are patchworks of bright orange, yellow, greens and blues. It’s as if the artist applied Takashi Murakami’s giddy anime color to Sarah Morris’s architectural grids and ran the results through CAD software. In the many reviews of this popular exhibition, critics uniformly identified a reinterpretation of reality through the digital eye, or “…computer flight simulations programmed by Crayola…” as a reviewer for The New Yorker so aptly put it.

In the last two years, Giehler has started to venture away from flat planes to experiment with non-anonymous landscapes. In ‘Lhotse’ and ‘K2-North Spur’, he applies his candy colors to paintings of the world’s tallest peaks. By moving from the generic to the specific, the artist conjures up a different kind of frontier – one in which men and women still risk death, not to go ‘where no man has gone before’, but to retrace those feats faster and with less help. Both bodies of work, the mountains and the planes, express a desire to renegotiate the landscape on our own terms. The latest paintings, ‘Torben Giehler 2.0’, upgrade the terrain to a higher difficulty level while still reminding us that the future is now.

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A young woman perches tentatively on the arm of a sofa in her studio apartment, near a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio. She could be any single, young woman just starting out in life. But in fact, as explained in a caption below her picture, she is in the process of selling her home in the Favela Vigario Geral, Rio de Janeiro’s shantytown notorious for military police violence.

This photograph is the first of nearly one hundred that fill the first thirty pages of the catalogue for Documenta11, this summer’s blockbuster exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany. On page after page, crowds protest, soldiers patrol, and relatives hold up photos of missing or dead loved ones. Photographs, not by artists but by press photographers, from around the world set the tone for the most socially conscious Documenta to date.

Like an aesthetic Amnesty International, the tragic effects of war and bad governance are highlighted in the exhibition halls as well. Artistic director Okwui Enwezor identifies the current age as a, “…turbulent time of unceasing cultural, social and political frictions, transitions, transformations, fissures and global institutional consolidations.” This assessment comes across well in work like Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman’s video on 18 monitors of illegal aliens crossing the U.S./Mexican border, which suggests the difficulty and perhaps futility of patrolling a porous border. Leon Golub’s large-scale paintings of murderous soldiers threatening, “We can disappear you,” are emblematic of corrupt military power. Nearby, a sculptural installation of metal chairs by Doris Salcedo memorializes the wholesale slaughter of a guerilla group by the Columbian government.

Before embarking on what was bound to be a controversial exhibition, Enwezor took two major steps. First, he appointed a team of six international curators. They then organized a series of four discussion ‘platforms,’ international conferences attended by more intellectuals and academics than artists, which began over a year ago. The meetings decentralized the exhibition itself, instead foregrounding debate on topics like the developing nature of democracy or the contrast between judicial justice and truth and reconciliation in countries where enemies must once again live as neighbors.

Although the curators have warned that the exhibition as the fifth platform is not a way of summarizing the first four, there are definite connections between the themes discussed and the work on display. For instance, Isaac Julien’s video “Paradise Omeros” explores the impact of globalism on post-colonial identity and was filmed on St Lucia, the setting for Platform 3, a workshop on Creolization. Likewise, reconciliation, or atonement for past sins, is a strong thematic element in South African artist William Kentridge’s animations. His new video, ‘Zeno Writing,’ tells the story of Zeno’s tortured self-analysis of his politics.

Kentridge is one of several South African artists in the exhibition who respond to the history of apartheid and its legacy. Kendell Geers presents photographs of security warnings on the gates of suburban homes, while Santu Mofokeng’s unpeopled black and white landscape photographs taken on Robben Island personalize the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. Mofokeng’s photograph of a limestone quarry is echoed elsewhere by an over-the-top installation by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. In a darkened room, Jaar presents three texts, one of which describes the damage done to Mandela’s eyes while working in the blinding glare of a limestone quarry. Viewers then walk through two very dark passages that end in a blinding wall of light.

Documenta’s political awareness context casts a new interpretive light on work by several of the show’s best-known artists. Louise Bourgeois’s cruelly caged torsos and dolls push interpretation of her sculpture beyond the usual autobiographical approach. Fellow American Jeff Wall’s ‘Invisible Man,’ a photographed reenactment from Ralph Ellison’s novel by the same name, seems anomalous in Wall’s oeuvre, but no less enjoyable. Similarly, Candida Höfer, the only disciple of German photographers Berndt and Hilla Becher to be included in the show, is represented by her photographs of Rodin’s ‘The Burghers of Calais’, photographed in situ in museums and private collections. The Bechers themselves are represented by two series of photographs featuring half-timbered houses that emphasize the social more than the architectural nature of their chronicling.

Considering how fond the curatorial team seems to be of describing art as a means of ‘knowledge production,’ it should come as no surprise that there is so much documentary video. Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar’s ‘A Season Outside’ repeats the question, “When is violent resistance right?” in a visually rich video documenting life on the India-Pakistan border. Nearby, Israeli born documentarist Eyal Sivan cut together black and white photographs of Rwanda taken in 1996, two years after the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis.

Less violent, but no less political, Ulrike Ottinger’s filmed trips through Eastern Europe and Western Asia include the one described in ‘South East Passage.’ The demanding length of this 366 minute long video, documenting the people and places encountered on a trip to Odessa, will make it a conceptual artwork for most viewers. Although considerably shorter at 25 minutes, Steve McQueen’s journey into the deepest gold mine in South Africa still required patience on the part of the viewer by virtue of the fact that almost nothing was visible apart from an occasional grainy helmet light flickering across the screen. Similarly slow-paced but absorbing, Zarina Bhimji’s ‘Out of Blue’ slowly moves through the empty houses, barracks and commercial properties abandoned in 1974 when Idi Amin banished Asians from Uganda. Bhimji’s own family fled to the U.K., making this thoughtful video both personally and historically meaningful.

If history is still being written, many of these artists intend to be one of the authors. Fareed Armaly, an American artist with a Lebanese-Palestinian background living in Germany, documents the history of Palestine. For Documenta11, he filled multiple rooms with documentary videos, maps tracking the movement and territory of Palestinians, classic films and postcards following the marketing of Palestinian culture and history for the outside world. Armaly’s collaborative accumulation of historical fact and personal stories is an exhibition unto itself and demonstrates the power of history as a form of protest over current events. His foil is New York based Lebanese artist Walid Ra’ad, who operates under the auspices of The Atlas Group to concoct ironically false historical data about the history of the Middle East. Ra’ad presents the fabricated findings of his fictitious organization, for example, the 29 photo prints supposedly found buried under rubble in Beirut, which allegedly turned out to be portraits of those lost in the Mediterranean Sea during the country’s two decade long war.

The superabundance of text in this exhibition was nowhere more evident than in three large rooms occupied by Allan Sekula’s ‘Fish Story.’ The American artist produced series of photographs and wall texts composed during a five-year investigation of the worldwide shipping industry. From Glasgow to South Korea, Sekula’s worldwide travels tracked a migratory industry and the communities in its wake and in its path. It often seemed that just when art seemed to have totally converted to reportage, an installation or film would inject some pop culture to liven things up again. That was the case with Pierre Huyghe’s ‘Block Party,’ a documentary about the early days of Hip Hop, when its founding fathers tapped current from street lights to power their turntables. The recorded recollections of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash are the soundtrack to a nostalgic remembrance of Hip Hop before it became a multi-billion dollar industry.

Although it seems like it in retrospect, Documenta11 doesn’t only include video and photography. Architecture in the service of social engineering has witnessed many false starts in this century but makes an appearance in the exhibition. Utopian artists/architects like Yona Friedman and Dutch artist Constant push the possibilities far beyond their realistic potential in several models, paintings and drawings. Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez makes similarly unrealizable, Las Vegas-like fantasy architectural models from product packaging, including a plan for a rebuilt downtown Manhattan. Simparch, a duo of American artists, abandoned tiny models and constructed an indoor, tunnel-like structure in which visitors could sit and enjoy an ambient orchestra of micro-sounds. They also transformed a huge room into a wooden version of a curvy swimming pool for skateboarding, which was enthusiastically being used by local skaters.

In a gesture questioning traditional boundaries of high and low, the exhibition includes documentation of grass roots arts groups like Le Groupe Amos. This group of Christian activists based in Kinshasa, Congo uses visual art, theatre, documentary and radio programs for public education. Similarly, Huit Facettes use the arts to create a bridge between local craft and fine art in rural Senegal. Under the title ‘Park Fiction’, community leaders in Hamburg Germany employed art, film, and theater to stage creative demonstrations against a plan to develop the last remaining waterfront property in their neighborhood. As if the curators anticipated that these community-based projects would be perceived as too removed from work by professional artists, they were segregated in the lounge-like atmosphere of the Documenta-Halle.

Doubtless, Documenta11 will be criticized in the U.S. for including too few American artists, being too preachy and not aesthetically engaging enough. Before the exhibition even began, it seemed unfortunate that the various platforms were staged in locations around the world, making it impossible for most people to attend. However, videos from the conference are available on the Documenta website, providing options (fast forward and rewind) that turn out to make home viewing far more convenient.

With so much text-based work to read and so many hours of video to make time for, Documenta is a difficult exhibition to see quickly. It’s even harder to judge as a whole, for the simple fact that very few people will see all of it. And it can seem dry if learning about fluctuations in the world’s shipping industry is not your idea of an enjoyable day looking at art. In fact, the ‘is it art?’ question is bound to surface, this time in relation to whether many of the projects would have been better realized as history books or entries in a film festival.

Documenta11 often seems to challenge the notion that looking at art should be an enjoyable experience, although anyone familiar with contemporary art knows that visual pleasure is not a pre-requisite. This exhibition steadfastly reminds viewers of that. But after so much art meant for our own good, encounters with more aesthetically pleasing or narrative work were all the more enjoyable. Isaac Julien’s visually lush film ‘Paradise Omeros’ was dizzyingly pleasing to watch. Shirin Neshat’s latest film ‘Tooba,’ set this time in Mexico instead of Morocco, is vintage Neshat – mysteriously abstract and engaging. A confessional video on three screens by Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila delves into the minds of a young woman with schizophrenic tendencies and a modern day fairy tale by Stan Douglas is like a never ending choose-your-own-adventure story (the piece runs for 100 days without repeating).

At the beginning of this year’s art season, many questioned whether their involvement in the art world had been frivolous, and others proclaimed that art would ‘never be the same again.’ Documenta’s direct engagement with political, economic and cultural globalism puts art in direct relation to current events. As a form of ‘knowledge production’, art has never been more relevant.

For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine

Although the photographs occupied the entire front gallery, the videos in the back room were the highlight of the show. They ranged in style from an animated cartoon about a group of young boys in a playground, who punch, push, and taunt one another in the name of fun, to a scene shot with two actors in a parked car at night. In this disturbing drama, a man and woman embrace lovingly and then, with her full cooperation, he methodically cuts off her ear with a razor. In another video, an elderly man and woman sit side by side, doing and saying nothing while turtles crawl around at their feet.

In his modern-day version of the three ages of man, Perrone documents the cruelty of children, creates a metaphor for the disfiguring pain of adult relationships, and wisecracks about the slow pace of old age. The artist spotlights ordinary people who deal with extraordinary situations. In a video from 1999, also included in the exhibition, a mentally retarded man makes frustrated attempts at building a shelter from a pile of bamboo sticks. His disappointing results are less interesting than his quiet concentration and hesitant strategizing, two working methods that Perrone himself seems to employ to captivating effect.

For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine

The new photographs still evoke an eerie ‘not quite right’ feel but with a fairy tale twist. In one scenario, a man has just abandoned his car, stripped out of his drab brown suit, and started to climb a gigantic flowering vine. Elsewhere, a strong searchlight (or alien spacecraft’s tractor beam?) cuts through the night illuminating a sky full of butterflies. During the day, dazed young people construct a mountain of flowers in the middle of the street. Prompted by the unnatural events, some characters lose their inhibitions or senses, like the nude and dripping wet, mother who enters the dining room while her husband and two teenage kids finish dinner.

The recent pictures lack the gore and direct menace of some of Crewdson’s earlier photographs, in which decaying human and animal bodies were not uncommon. The one cadaver that does turn up is that of a young woman, in a classic Ophelia pose, floating face up in a flooded living room. In general, the photographs are beautifully lit and the subject matter is tantalizing, but the townspeople seem to have lost their ability to respond. They are alive but stunned; there is little action and almost no emotion evident on their faces, which does nothing to create sympathy in the viewer. They wander stunned, like Hamlet’s Ophelia in her insanity before she drowned, their blank stares proving King Claudius right when he said, “Poor Ophelia. Divided from herself and her fair judgment without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts.”

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The new work breaks loose from the strict minimalism and control of his previous sculpture and supplies plenty of evidence of the artist’s hand and his trips to the hardware store. Unhidden nuts and bolts, wooden joints taped together and hardware with the manufacturers labels still stuck on, along with frequent use of a black marker pen create a tension between the overall impression and the ‘micro,’ surface details.

Most of the sculpture is at the average human height (150-170 cm) making intimate viewing easy, and the shapes sometimes mimic the human form in a way reminiscent of Modernist sculptor David Smith. ‘Soldier of Fortune’ and ‘Upskirt’ are horizontal constructions of wooden beams, the former rough and tumble with protruding nails, the later involving a small square platform on wooden ‘legs’, draped by a canvas suggesting a dangerously short skirt.

Canvas reappears on the floor under ‘In the Process of Becoming’, a three-legged construction suggesting an artist’s easel with a shelf holding a Polaroid of a barred window in the artist’s studio. Is the angst-ridden ‘prison window’ and the triumph of the easel as it rests on top of canvas an ironic take on the creative process? Sculptures like ‘Albatross,’ in which a jaggedly cut piece of white, laminated composition board replicates ruffled feathers, suggest that Meadows is a playfully self-aware artist. But one thing is clear. Unlike the ancient mariner who wears the albatross around his neck for his sins, Meadows’ sculpture doesn’t languish in the doldrums.

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In Tibet, devotees spin handheld wheels in prayer. With Huang’s version, only a god-sized hand could wield the massive rod, made from an entire tree trunk. The rod and the lid occupy one room, while the circular drum housing a giant scroll covered in written prayers rests on its side in the back gallery. Two spiraling scrolls, one a Tibetan sutra and the other a text from the Koran, descend from the ceiling and a scale model of Salpétrière with motorized wheel rests on a Persian carpet. A modern version of an ancient chariot and a long scroll complete the exhibition.

Huang’s use of monumental scale is not unprecedented in his work. Nor has he shied away from overtly Buddhist imagery, once combining a bottle rack structure on the order of Duchamp, with 50 pairs of arms to create a version of the multi-armed deity Guan-Yin. Since his involvement in the radical Xiamen Dada group in the late 80s, Huang has strategically incorporated Western ideas into his Buddhist influenced philosophy. But given the artist’s past attack on the West’s self-perceived hegemony, it doesn’t seem likely that he is hoping for the reconciliation of three different faith systems by simply placing their symbols in proximity to each other. In previous work, Huang has often used insects and reptiles, often enclosing them together, forcing them to kill or be killed. Considering that the creatures were intended to represent different cultures, the Salpétrière project may be the subversive opposite of a wish to homogenize the world’s religions.

For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine

The music was accompanied by a small wall-mounted monitor that displayed not images of the band but the lyrics of the song “Full of You,” translated into English. On another monitor, flashes of lightning periodically shattered a perfect night sky full of twinkling stars. The presence of these stars during a storm was as mysterious as the unexplained dazzling light that appeared in a short video projected against a gallery wall. Shot at sunrise on a beach, the clip featured a beam of light on the horizon that was brighter than the rising sun. Both scenes served to introduce the short story that was at the heart of the exhibition: Using Dramatica, a software program used by writers to generate story outlines, Arenas concocted a narrative about a man who, suffering from unrequited love, exiles himself to the countryside, where he invents a machine to manufacture gems from the beauty of nature. On the back walls, three small monitors and three digital prints tracked the transformation of flowers, berries, and buds, sucked into a spinning vortex and released as sapphires, diamonds, and rubies.

The relationship between El Binomio’s lyrics and a story in which the countryside gives up precious stones for a clever inventor is hard to pin down but evocative. Perhaps the Golden Duo (a rough translation of the band’s name) was mining the language of the Latin love song to come up with its lyrical gems. In light of the fact that the lover serenaded in vallenato is considered by some to represent the homeland, Arenas seems to be making love to her native country while realizing that her recollections of its beauty are seen through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia.

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John Miller’s eerie mannequin also subverted fashion and, positioned near the gallery windows, attracted attention from the street. Its physical presence was echoed in Sam Samore’s two-way mirror piece composed of the “room, viewers, interiority, exteriority, etc.” Mirroring was everywhere, with a mirror in the shape of a Rorschach by Kelley Walker, tree roots on a mirror by Sam Durant and a Roy Lichtenstein mirror painting.

Seven large paintings, hung salon style on the back wall of the gallery’s cavernous space, were a visual highlight of the show. What at first looked like one of John Tremblay’s frisky abstract paintings turned out to be a yellow and black Infinite Dot painting by Yayoi Kusama, while a Trembly in muted tones hung above. Next to these, an enormous date painting by On Kawara contrasted the open-ended possibility of the Kusama and Tremblay with its blunt statement of a single date.

It’s not always evident what curator Bob Nickas was intending by his eclectic mix. He admits that he curates “…as if free-association was an accepted curatorial/art historical tool,” explaining, for example, that Sherrie Levine appears because she is foundational to contemporary art in general. Lisa Ruyter’s day-glo jets are included because she invigorates her painting by working from her photographs rather than her having any specific aesthetic affiliation to the art on the walls around her. But as an exploration “from the observatory” into the deep space of contemporary art, Nickas provides enough connections to suggest a bigger picture, while still keeping us gazing with curiosity.

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By incorporating various symbols from astronomy, world mythology, and science fiction in his drawings, the artist has developed a unique vocabulary. In one piece, a huge-eyed extraterrestrial stands on top of a funnel projecting the symbol of Heaven’s Gate, the cult whose members organized a mass suicide in California in 1997. Nearby are alien ships, planets, winged beasts, and a giant scarab. In another drawing, a man wearing a top hat and long beard stands in front of a celestial map as he operates an enormous telescope. To his right stands a creature that is half man, half fish, beyond which appears a question-mark shape associated with BÖC. A giant phallus, a man on a premodern flying machine, and clusters of planets recur in several drawings.

As long as human beings persist in asking fundamental questions—“Who are we? What are we doing here?”—science , technology, and mythology will continue to provide inadequate answers. In the meantime, Bransford’s accumulated findings make for some interesting imagery. Just as the artist is attracted to BÖC’s homemade cosmology for its “transhistorical and nonlinear” characteristics, he plunges into alchemical and astrological texts for answers to life’s mysteries. In addition to the zodiacal diagrams, random symbols, and space-age machinery, Bransford reproduces mutated creatures that are reminiscent of the twisted imagination of Hieronymus Bosch or the satirical engravings of Pieter Bruegel. Bransford’s references to iconographic systems from the past, brought into the twenty-first century and combined with symbols of mystical knowledge, produce sometimes apocalyptic and usually fantastical results. The Dungeons and Dragons edge that pops up now and again, as well as the artist’s allusions to heavy-metal imagery, will be like candy to some, poison to others. But when Bransford’s worlds collide, they produce a powerful commentary on the search for meaning in life.

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For the final show of the gallery’s 30th anniversary year, Ronald Feldman F.A. proved its vitality with an exhibition of videos by young artist Rico Gatson. Gatson, a standout in last summer’s popular ‘Freestyle’ group show in Harlem, delves into the Hollywood archives for his material. Using video editing software, he selects films as diverse as ‘Alien’, ‘King Kong’ and ‘Superfly’ and then subjects them to an editing process in which a quarter of the film screen is mirrored, resulting in an intense, kaleidoscopic effect. The show stopper is ‘Departure,’ in which Gatson condenses a scene from the movie ‘Alien’ into an intense series of pans and zooms featuring the determined but petrified protagonist as she exits the exploding ship. Another highlight, “Jungle, Jungle” presents two sequences of human sacrifice made in the 1933 classic film ‘King Kong.’ Gatson maintains a dual focus on the representation of African Americans in film, and on the many faces of fear. Whether the videos feature a giant, raging gorilla, or a gruesome alien, the result is a mini-lexicon of terror that forces viewers to confront their own fears – a task which is never more relevant than now.