This week, as the winter solstice approached, Paris, LA visited Supple Expansions at Freedman Fitzpatrick Gallery in Los Angeles, celebrated the launch of the Allan Kaprow.Posters book, listened to the captivating sounds of pianist Francesco Tristano, visited Jesse Stecklow‘s solo show at M+B Gallery, and studied new paintings by Sergej Jensen at Regen Projects.
In M+B Gallery’s new exhibition of artist Jesse Stecklow, Potential Derivatives, the works are all hung low near the floor, requiring close and crouched attention. Many of the pieces include air samples or the data collected from past samples in other exhibition spaces; along with an unfurled and reused roll of flypaper, they preserve past hangings of the show in its current iteration. In some works, lab-grade tuning forks collect sound waves from the gallery. In others, layers of photographed flypaper and chemical lists shift beneath both real and photo-edited holes, creating elusive and varied depth.
A list of the exhibition’s eclectic media, from the exhibition statement:
There is a speaker in a rotating barrel whose grilles are plugged with cumin. There is one box that rattles, one that taps, and a third that is quiet.
There are fly tapes and glue traps.
There is tuning fork three ways, elongated, blackened and quartz.
There is a pickled ghost text measured to fit the length of an office. There is an ignorant system of amber hung at equidistant points. There is recycled clock glass held in lead channels.
There are cages and ball bearing games and resonator boxes. There is data and some of its potential derivatives.
SUPPLE EXPANSIONS draws on work by three artists from disparate positions to mold the gallery space into a portal – a somatic voyage to dreamscape beyond the frontiers of waking cognition.
Heidi Bucher, Fragment, Undated Caoutchouc skin, gauze 79 x 94.5 in (200 x 240 cm) © Michael Underwood
Born in the mountain city of Winterthur, Switzerland in 1926, Heidi Bucher moved to California in the 1960s, where she collaborated with her husband, Carl Bucher, on a series of oversized, wearable foam sculptures. Shot on 8mm, “Body Shells” documents performers dancing across Venice Beach’s sand in Bucher’s plushy abstractions of familiar shapes. Exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972, “Body Shells” marked the beginning of an artistic practice that spanned until her death in 1993. In her “Skinnings”, she surveyed the contiguous relationship between bodies, textile, and personal environments. Working with materials analogous to the body – liquid latex, caoutchouc, and rubber – Bucher’s peeled off casts are physical transcriptions of routine material turned poetry. Paired alongside a video work by Shimabuku, and an installation by Phillip Zach, SUPPLE EXPANSIONS marks the first presentation of Bucher’s work in Los Angeles since 1972.
installation view © Michael Underwood
installation view © Michael Underwood
Heidi Bucher, Psychiatrische Anstalt in Kreuzlingen – Schloss Bellevue, 1988, Latex, textile 39.5 x 47.2 (100 x 120 cm) © Michael Underwood
Heidi Bucher Untitled (Boden dunkel), Undated Rubber on Carton21.7 x 28 in (55 x 71 cm) © Michael Underwood
Shimabuku, Sunrise at Mt. Artsonje , 20078mm film transferred to digital file (3min. 30sec. / color / no sound/ 4:3) © Michael Underwood
Staging performances where the event itself defines the intention, Shimabuku encourages us to perceive the simplest expe- riences in life through a new lens fashioned by humored curiosity. His video “Flying Me” (2005), documents the artist flying a kite in the shape of himself, like a rocket man soaring high above the sea through an expanse of bright blue. In “Sunrise at Mt. Artsonje” (2007), we see the artist repurposing his breakfast by holding a cutlassfish up to the dawning sun, its silvery iridescent surface serving as a heliograph. Like Bucher’s “Skinnings”, Shimabuku’s performances re-cast that which is famil- iar into something odd and mysterious.
Phillip Zachwave (peak-to-peak), 2014wool felt, wood, madder root, osage orange, indigo, cochineal, Mimosa hostilis, chinese ink, acid dye8.5 x 150 x 30 in (21.5 x 381 x 76 cm) © Michael Underwood
Phillip Zach’s contribution for SUPPLE EXPANSIONS is a landscape of modular furniture, styled into a playground. Coated in a layer of wool felt, the work is infused with natural and synthetic dyes, including a plant source for the psychedelic com- pound DMT and cactus lice. Emulating a large-scale model for the plasticity of the mind, and the polymorphic occurrence of waves, as in light or sound, these works echo organic architecture and utopian design. Projecting a vision of naturally reoc- curring forms, they correspond to the human body’s supple physiology. Melding a vision of porous corporeality with figments of systemic structure, Zach’s immersive environment acts as an egress from static materiality.
Until January 10th
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Allan Kaprow
This week on the blog we visited the new exhibition Paris De Noche at Night Gallery; we had a review on the last days at Art Basel Miami; we passed by Faire des Fleurs, a show curated by Camille Azaïs at Florence Loewy; we heard about a new limited edition: Initiation; and we finally saw Pacific Sun, a stop-motion film by photographer Thomas Demand.
Pacific Sun, a stop-motion film by photographer Thomas Demand, begins screening in the lobby level of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum this weekend. Demand constructs and photographs elaborate paper sets, inspired by real locations in world news and everyday life. The extreme finesse of his paper reproductions make it difficult to distinguish between the real and the constructed. Demand destroys his sets after photographing them, their ephemerality embodying what Roland Barthes called photography’s “dive into literal Death.”
From the exhibition statement:
Pacific Sun—made in Los Angeles while Demand was a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute—derives from security-camera footage, circulated via YouTube, of the chaos inside a cruise ship weathering a storm in the South Pacific: chairs, tables, bottles, cartons, and people careened as the ship lurched. Intrigued by these complex movements, Demand decided to re-create the video, minus the people, by constructing and animating a life-size paper model. The soundtrack, created after the film’s completion, evokes tumbling objects and the rolling sea. Pacific Sun is an ambitious and provocative work examining society’s willing acceptance of mass-media imagery as a substitute for actual experience. Projected at full scale, Demand’s film immerses viewers in a moment that, while seeming familiar, is totally fabricated.
A brief clip from Pacific Sun:
You can see all of Pacific Sun at LACMA with the full quality of a film projector until April 12.