Cédric Delsaux @ Project 4

Cory Oberndorfer



Cédric Delsaux's show Landscapes/Star Wars on Earth reminded me why I love art. It made me smile. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? Here's a segment from the press release:

Delsaux's digital photographs combine myth and reality. The work is subtle and serene in his Landscapes series, and overtly humorous in his Star Wars on Earth Series, in which Delsaux photographs toy figurines and then digitally places them in Parisian suburbs. His training in commercial photography is evident with his play on branding in the Star Wars on Earth series. Conversely, in Landscapes, traces of human existence are either remote or totally absent. In both series, the expansive and dream-like scenes combined with colors that contrast the washy with the bold is what captivates.

If you have the opportunity, check it out.
Project 4 Gallery is located at 903 U Street NW in Washington, DC. Wed-Fri 2-6pm, Sat noon-6pm

Katrín Sigurdardóttir: High Plane V

Cory Oberndorfer
P.S. 1 Installations
Katrín Sigurdardóttir: High Plane V

Coming into Katrín Sigurdardóttir’s installation space, “High Plane V”, the viewer walks into a room occupied only by two handmade wooden ladders leading to holes in the ceiling. The title card not only explains that it is interactive, but it is meant to be viewed by two people at the same time. After journeying to the top of the steep ladders, the viewers must stick their heads through the head-sized hole to experience the world above. The space you are entering is a brightly lit arctic landscape. It is painted white and has sparse areas of carved blue foam resembling some sort of topography. Given the color and sense of barrenness, they appear to be glacial formations in an arctic icescape.
While looking across the space, the viewer can also see the head of the other viewer peaking over the formations, floating in a disconnected way. The physical distance is not far, but any communication seems awkward and out of place. At this point, I remembered that only one-eighth of an iceberg is visible above the surface. Consistent with this measurement, the human body is eight heads tall, and only one-eighth is visible. The viewers have become icebergs and installed themselves into the topography. I really began to think about the distance between the formations, just as the distance between myself and the other viewer. Beneath the surface, we had shared a conversation, but now there was such separation. Were the formations once part of a whole, or are they still connected beneath?
My personal interpretation of Sigurdardóttir’s installation involves the social and ecological effect of technology. I think about how many times I have seen couple on a date, both on the phone talking or texting another person. They are so busy talking with someone far away that the interpersonal interaction is lost, creating a distance. At the same time, it is because of our technological advances that we are speeding the global warming process. Glaciers are falling apart at an astonishing rate. In both examples, we are breaking apart something that once held such power and beauty.

Embedded at Conner Contemporary

reviewed by David Waddell

I visited the Maria Friberg exhibition at Conner Contemporary the other day. This Swedish video artist and photographer has had three solo shows at Conner in the past six years. This one is titled ‘Embedded,’ which features one video triptych and four photographs. While I did not pay as much attention to the photography, the video completely mesmerized me. Two of the three screens were packed for PULSE art fair, but I still enjoyed the experience on the single screen. It made gallery hopping worthwhile.

The video fits into a range of categories. It reflects nature, fashion photography, advertisements, landscape and subjects of masculinity and feminism.

Due to the pace of the video, one primarily associates the work with nature. Four men dressed in black, slowly emerge from the center of a mattress which is luxuriously draped in white sheets. Some compare the action in the video to the cycle of a caterpillar transforming in a cocoon. My immediate thoughts were that of a rose bud opening its petals. The figures are born from the center and creep towards the parameters of the screen. A horizonless background allows the viewer to dismiss scale. It might as well be the center of a flower.

I had wondered if Friberg incorporated stop-motion animation. Norm McClaren shot frame-by-frame to capture humans performing impossible tasks. I suspected that the movement was altered and slowed down as well. Friberg states that the work was done in real time. While I gasp at the thought of a person having to perform this excruciatingly slow act, she explains that dancers were no good at the assigned task. Rather, those who used meditation were successful.

It makes sense that Friberg uses men who meditate. The work is about isolation and the mental and physical boundaries of the body. It is about the individual that is so much smaller than the scope of the world. We never can escape ourselves and pull out to see ‘the bigger picture.’ Even those in the same bed are not in communication. They are silent bed partners and separate entities. The bed acts as a cloud, an island, a raft and an iceberg.

When listening to the discussion between Friberg and Julee Holcombe on feminism, I thought, “Yes, these men are the muse.” The woman is stands behind the camera as a director and in control. The men seem limp and without control at all. Contrary to the visuals, this is a real act and these men are in complete control of their movement. Their minds are in tune with their bodies through meditation. Friberg is documenter in this instance.

The aesthetics of the work emasculates these men as they slide off this bed, in a flaccid manner. They are arched back, stretched out and beautified. I associate these men with the backup dancers for this one Shania Twain video. Twain is dressed in a suit as a man. She has the microphone and is in control. She is surrounded by men with shaved heads and red fishnet shirts. They play fake guitars and are merely present as eye candy in this gender role reversal.

I also associate these men with a skin commercial due to the black-and-white color schematics and costuming. The exposed body parts are central locations for lotion: the hands, feet and face. In the commercial, a leathery alligator waddles through a minimal stage towards someone who needs lotion. I feel the same deliberate staging in this work.

I find this work so appealing because it falls into the realm of good photography, advertising, and staged fashion. Friberg has an acute sense of color and compostion because she was a trained painter. This is evident in the video as well as her photography.

Friberg got into this line of work because she did not want to be isolated in the studio. And yet she makes work about isolation. When viewing ‘Embedded’ I felt like I was alone in the gallery having an intimate moment with the video screen.

Pedagogical Vertigo: The Paintings and Drawings of Stanley Lewis

Tim Campbell

I have not yet met Stanley Lewis, but I felt compelled to write about the work in his retrospective at the Katzen Arts Center because I have recently become aware of his presence hiding behind my education as a painter. While viewing the show, I began to feel as if I had always been receiving his teachings second-hand, via professors who had worked with him or had been taught by him in the past. Mr. Lewis’s presence has been felt at the Art Institute of Chicago, Kansas City Art Institute, Yale, Boston University, the New York Studio School, and American University, among others; he has zigzagged across many of the MFA and BFA programs between Chicago and New York.

My first exposure to Lewis’s work was as an undergraduate; one of his pencil drawings was featured in a show of works on paper at my college art gallery. The same drawing that introduced me to Lewis as an undergrad is featured in his current retrospective. As I viewed and reviewed it last week, I experienced a vivid flood of memories of the exact same chunks of paper and glue, the exact same slashes into the flesh of the parchment block, the exact same cords and tendons of graphite which form such neurotic networks of branches and bramble. These drawings have a very real way of staying in your memory, because they reproduce with passionate detail the parts of landscape that art usually ignores. Lewis is incredibly capable when it comes to bringing life to his work; his edgy lines not only represent the trees he is so engaged in picturing, they become palpable, physical presences that tremble and dance before the viewer.

Much like the paintings of Pollock, this work has a physical strength to it. Physicality of material and the physical manifestation of process are clearly primary concerns for Lewis while he is painting. Unlike Pollock, however, Lewis does not erase every pictorial trace of inspiration, context, or source. He loves light-filled landscapes (there were very few cloudy, stormy or nocturnal pictures), and he is very serious about maintaining a commitment to what can be reproduced from observation. This obsession brings his work close to Giacometti’s portrait paintings. And like Giacometti, the point of these paintings seems to be for the viewer to watch Lewis trying to get it right, trying to capture what he sees in paint. It’s about the process of finding a balance between expressive mark and pictorial responsibility.

While made with incredible skill, pure craft cannot be the only goal of the work because Lewis deliberately staples fresh canvas into his paintings instead of sewing or pasting new portions, which would offer a smoother and less dramatic shift in surface. In addition, he deliberately shows the build-up of obscene amounts of paint instead of scraping the canvas down, washing it, and reworking it. The build-up of paint and the staples have another function, as well: they make the paintings more concerned with honesty than with beauty. Lewis wants to show us how he gets to a finished painting; he doesn’t want to hide his process behind a nice finish or a nice view. This honesty does not allow for a tremendous amount of variety in the paintings, but it is an honesty that I respect.

Sometimes, the paintings do not hold my interest because of the subject matter. The works show a surprising silence when it comes to commenting on the subjects they depict. The places that Lewis shows us are everyday corner stores, chain link fences, backyards and commonplace fields. They are familiar; they do not offer any surprising events buried within this familiarity, nor are they transferred into the world of metaphor or allegory. Since so much attention is spent upon the medium of paint and the process of picture-making, it is impossible to imagine these locations without the presence of Mr. Lewis. His intensity and psyche are necessary components to this work, and therefore he enters into the content.

Overall, the show displays the career of an intense artist obsessed with understanding the landscapes that he finds himself in. The paintings work best when they erupt into energetic fields of mark that compete with the spatial illusions of landscape, and the drawings come across as the stronger works because of how Lewis amazingly maps every single branch of whatever tree he is looking at. The locations found in the paintings are portrayed as they are seen by the artist; that is, as visual information for a painting. The role of these locations, or their greater importance, is left up to the viewer.

If you are interested in seeing the work of a masterful picture-maker whose main concern is the construction of paintings, then this show will be a treat for its spectacular intensity and unusual techniques. If not, then the show might prove to be uninteresting because of the commonplace qualities of Lewis’s chosen vistas. Either way, this retrospective shows the dedication and achievements of a highly unusual and unique landscape artist.

Which recently exhibited artist has been most influential on your work?
	Matthew Barney
	Jasper Johns
	Joseph Cornell
	Stanley Lewis
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