I viewed Solid States/Liquid Objects an exhibition by Nina Sellars and Joanna Zylinska at Shifted Gallery in Richmond today. First thoughts were that both exhibitions were very slick. What I mean by this is that the objects were highly developed, refined and elegant.
However, although Sellars inverse camera obscuras were seductive as objects in themselves and the multiple images of a small light globe projected onto the gallery wall, was quite beautiful in their intricate simplicity, I found the notion of body viscera, or human nervous system that was represented as digital circuit board (painted onto the gallery wall) bereft of any sense at all of the human body. Indeed, if Sellars intended to show the relationship between light and matter then she failed miserably. Likewise, although her intention in the darkened gallery space was to create the feel of an anatomy lecture theatre ‘in which observers direct their gaze forwards, towards a cadaver in the centre of the room’ (Catalogue essay: Dr Melissa Miles) this was not clear nor the need for multiple camera obscuras, when one, single unit could have been used to state something that was painfully obvious, that is, that light is necessary as a medium of exposure or revelation. If her intention was to show that light or energy is vital to communications and imaging technologies, and has reduced the physicality of the human body in some cases, to data - part of an extensive electronic system, reduced to schematic of a circuit board, or pure information, then even this too is passé. Perhaps I just didn't get it!
On the other hand, Joanna Zylinska photographs captured the movement and fluidity of human bodies in everyday spatial environments, reminding us that life represented through the medium of light/photography, although fleeting and vulnerable is pure energy. Unfortunately her 'binary – zeros and ones' photograph has had so much currency over the past decade, used by many artists and discussed at length by Sadie Plant in her Zeros + Ones : Digital Women + the New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997. I was left feeling that these two bodies of work had been ‘speaking to each other’, but something had been lost in translation.
Julie Clarke ©2009
However, although Sellars inverse camera obscuras were seductive as objects in themselves and the multiple images of a small light globe projected onto the gallery wall, was quite beautiful in their intricate simplicity, I found the notion of body viscera, or human nervous system that was represented as digital circuit board (painted onto the gallery wall) bereft of any sense at all of the human body. Indeed, if Sellars intended to show the relationship between light and matter then she failed miserably. Likewise, although her intention in the darkened gallery space was to create the feel of an anatomy lecture theatre ‘in which observers direct their gaze forwards, towards a cadaver in the centre of the room’ (Catalogue essay: Dr Melissa Miles) this was not clear nor the need for multiple camera obscuras, when one, single unit could have been used to state something that was painfully obvious, that is, that light is necessary as a medium of exposure or revelation. If her intention was to show that light or energy is vital to communications and imaging technologies, and has reduced the physicality of the human body in some cases, to data - part of an extensive electronic system, reduced to schematic of a circuit board, or pure information, then even this too is passé. Perhaps I just didn't get it!
On the other hand, Joanna Zylinska photographs captured the movement and fluidity of human bodies in everyday spatial environments, reminding us that life represented through the medium of light/photography, although fleeting and vulnerable is pure energy. Unfortunately her 'binary – zeros and ones' photograph has had so much currency over the past decade, used by many artists and discussed at length by Sadie Plant in her Zeros + Ones : Digital Women + the New Technoculture. New York: Doubleday, 1997. I was left feeling that these two bodies of work had been ‘speaking to each other’, but something had been lost in translation.
Julie Clarke ©2009
Brecon said on fb entry of 28 August - quote:
ReplyDelete'Julie, your blogspot review of Nina and Joanna's joint show at Shifted Gallery is a really incisive blog that makes a few cogent, informative and rather slick critiques. I guess you can see what I was alluding to in the diagrammatic depictions in the La Roux video'.
Well, you might have to explain what you were actually alluding to in the 'diagrammatic depictions in the La Roux video', because I haven't looked at it yet.
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