Allen,
your show was magnificent, my favorite collection of work to date. I was a bit surprised and pleased to not see the sketchbooks, as the smaller green statue this work begins to stand alone and feels generally more confident, clearer. I begin to draw an analogy between mass, light, shadow, and mind/conciousness, ideas. This work suggests a volume, a substance to passing thoughts, broken/unstable ideas and in this way resembles the relationship a finished work takes to a sketch. The use of lights, lamps, and bulbs speaks to interiority, industry, invention, intervention but when broken speak of frustration and uselessness.
I read a sense of wonder about the properties of light and the play of shadow into your work, and through knowing you began to make a connection between a public and private self. Lights that usually provide, illumine, are swallowed and sinking into formless black masses set directly on the floor I wonder what the significance of a perfect cut halfway down the middle of lamp means…I am reminded of the larger broken bulb from last year and know you desire your audience be reminded of the fragility of lights and the materials used in lamps/bulbs. I wonder if this stands as metaphor for fractured set of decisions made within a studio setting. Yet this also points to an interiority of bulbs, the thin and fragile membrane of glass that mediates illumination, electricity.
One of my favorite aspects of the show was the formal connection between the spilled wine bubbles with the thought bubbles on the wall. You spilled thought comically thus indicating the importance of chance and process and absurdity of a thought bubble, or a public interiority. I draw a connection between a surface tension of spilled wine on the floor, the performed transparency or seeming contradiction of a thought bubble, and the membranes of glass that mediate illumination.
I think you could have gotten by with less work in the show. I would have liked to see a few of the sculptures alone in the space rather than a lot of sculptures filling the space. I thought that the relationship between ideas of fragility and transparency,and giving shape to non substance were strong in the work, yet it felt more like showing a number of ways to play out these ideas than a pointed exhibition.
Nathan,
I felt this was your strongest work to date also. After seeing how dramatically your work has changed since being here I admire you for moving in such a different direction. I see more of your interests in music personalities and the role of media playing into your work now, however your interest in time is what seems still apparent. Intermission speaks to a break in time, the time of narrative within a movie context or the space between songs on a cd, the time one takes to flip a record over. the television stood as a physical and metaphorical intermission to the enlarged cd plinths, no longer worthy of being labeled as compact. The compactness of cd’s is what was also placed in intermission as these trompel’oiel (sp?) enlargements serve to show how TV, the media, etc make stars larger than life.
I wonder how the everyday life of these stars personality began to blend into a public persona and how this shift took place over time, initially beginning as an intermission, yet eventually becoming a more permanent facade when possibly intermission could set in when self heard or seen on the TV or radio/cd.
Somehow I think about Michael Jackson buying the rights to Beatles songs and how royalties were placed on permanent intermission through legal processes for mcartney etc…
But back to time, giving us three bits of history, all from roughly the same time period and mediated in different ways. I wonder if there is a 33 & 1/3 degree enlargement of the Ruscha book, and the cd’s. The Ruscha book, a contemporary piece of high pop art has found it’s way back to the authors original intention as pulp, cheaply reproduced, while the beatles and boys both affirmed in their status as rock legends now bigger than life(again mediated by a relatively cheap method of reproduction. I wonder how the actual discs inside these proposals would sound, feel, and look, especially produced and presented similarly to the ruscha book. I mean, I see an analogy between the cheap and easy reproducabilty of xeroxed papers and my vision of stacked giveaway cd’s, possibly enlarged…
anyhow congrats on a great show!
