Megan and Murray

Thomas Demand's Camera at Hamburger Kunsthalle

[detail]

[detail]

Thomas Demand's installational photo show at the Hamburger Kunsthalle is at the front guard of conceptual photography. Steeped in scholarship and narrative — Demand has re-created the site of the burglary in the Embassy of Niger in Rome from which the stationary paper was stolen that then was used for forged contracts which the US intelligence services used as evidence to support the invasion of Iraq — Demand's video and photos are still decadently visual. In his trademark trompe l'oeil of Office-Depot stylized empty rooms constructed entirely out of paper and cardboard, painstakingly photographed, Demand damningly shows this house of cards that was the catalyst for a senseless war.

Thomas Demand. Camera
4 April to 6 July 2008
Hamburger Kunsthalle
Hamburg, Germany

Bruce Nauman at Hamburger Bahnhof

Bruce Nauman, Coffee Spilled and Balloon Dog

Lets face it: when you're young you just can't get everything. For me, one of those things was Bruce Nauman. There is just so little to it. But oh my, so much. His work Coffee Spilled and Balloon Dog contains a man trying unsuccessfully to make a balloon dog, and a dropped coffee cup. Both images suggest failure, yet failure never looked so good.

Joseph Beuys at Hamburger Bahnhof

Of course, there was an entire Beuys wing at the Hamburger Bahnhof.

Anna and Bernhard Blume at Hamburger Bahnhof

Hamburger Bahnhof is Berlin's museum of contemporary art. From their website:

Artists Anna and Bernhard Blume, born in 1937, have significantly extended the genre of the staged photograph, and they number among its most renowned exponents internationally. In their frequently multipart, large format, black–and–white photoseries, this artistic couple stages temporal sequences within which they themselves act as protagonists. The scenes are often reduced, estranged, and above all odd: order and chaos seem to mutually condition one another, role–playing and convention inhere in each object, conditioning modes of behavior and provoking resistance.

Inspiring.

Maryam Jafri at Alexandra Saheb

Maryam Jafri, Staged Archive (video still), 2008 [image courtesy of Galerie Alexandra Saheb, Berlin]

Maryam Jafri, Staged Archive (video still), 2008 [image courtesy of Galerie Alexandra Saheb, Berlin]

Maryam Jafri's exhibition at Galerie Alexandra Saheb in Berlin (April 26 - June 13, 2008) took me by surprise. Jafri, a solid storyteller and a kind of shaman, works in the traditions of theater and sculpture: with heavily built sets, props and lighting.

Staged Archive seems to float between nonfiction and the surreal, finding a location solidly supported by personal narrative and experiences I would expect everyone shares, regardless of age, race or gender, although each of these categories is wrestled with in the work.

Adrian Sauer at Klemm's

Adrian Sauer, Atelier (video still), 2008, 23:45 min., ed. 5+1 a.p. [image courtesy of KLEMM'S, Berlin]

Adrian Sauer, Atelier (video still), 2008, 23:45 min., ed. 5+1 a.p. [image courtesy of KLEMM'S, Berlin]

Adrian Sauer, Atelier (video still), 2008, 23:45 min., ed. 5+1 a.p. [image courtesy of KLEMM'S, Berlin]

Under the category of "this-is-not-what-it-seems-at-first-glance," Adrian Sauer's video installation, Atelier at Klemm's in Berlin, begs the audience to underestimate and then be surprised. As the video slowly circles the artist's studio, closer examination reveals that everything in the video is not real. All surfaces are computer processed and lack depth. The effect is beyond mere posterization and suggests the landscape is either computer modeled or Flash-vector traced from video: either way, a generous reward. The exhibition also includes several photographs of similarly created environments. Atelier closes June 21, 2008.

Darren Foote and Ali Smith at RHYS Gallery

Ali Smith, Interplanetary Chart, 2007, Oil, acrylic on canvas, 64''x68''

Darren Foote, Flashlight #2, 2008, Poplar, 100''x7''x7''

Boston-based artist Darren Foote and LA-based Ali Smith's current exhibition at RHYS Gallery is full of playful spacial observations. Smith's vibrant explosions of oil and acrylic toy with dimensionality, while Foote's poplar sculptures defining the reach of artificial light sources make the intangible tangible.

RHYS gallery will be relocating to Los Angeles soon, so be sure to stop into the Harrison Ave location while it is still on this coast.

RHYS Gallery
Darren Foote + Ali Smith
April 03 - May 02, 2008
http://rhysgallery.com/

Laura McPhee and Toni Pepe at Bernard Toale Gallery

Toni Pepe, Untitled from the series Angle of Repose (Tablecloth with Dust), 2007, Archival Inkjet print [courtesy of the gallery]

Laura McPhee, Beaver Ponds on Fisher Creek After Wild Fire, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho, 2007, C-print [courtesy of the gallery]

Bernard Toale Gallery's current exhibition pairs the work of two artists, Toni Pepe and Laura McPhee, with strikingly different approaches to photography.

McPhee's dramatic mountains and forests are hauntingly still landscapes captured with the precise eye of a photographer's photographer. Pepe's Angle of Repose series is an idea-based collection of staged photos of women in various household environments, creating a dark and moody narrative along the lines of Cindy Sherman's art historical pieces.

You'll want to bring a McPhee home with you, but you'll still be thinking about Pepe the next day.

Laura McPhee, Two Years Later
Toni Pepe, Angle of Repose
Bernard Toale Gallery
450 Harrison Ave, Boston 02118
April 2 through May 10

Julius Popp Presented by Dogenhaus Galerie at Volta

Julius Popp, Bit.Flow MK2, 2005-2008

One strike against technology-based artwork is that it's notoriously difficult to get to work correctly, as was the case with Julius Popp's Bit.Flow MK2 at the Dogenhaus booth at Volta. Since we've been fans of Popp's previous work, we stopped to talk to the dealer and find out what exactly we weren't seeing in its fully functioning form.

Popp's work sits right at the intersection of programming and engineering. He writes programs to scroll the internet for key words that contribute data to his mechanical systems that use materials to illustrate those patterns through ephemeral messages displayed or transmitted via custom-built machines. Amid the tangle of clear tubes on the floor, in theory, a pattern emerges if you're standing in a certain position in relation to the tubes.

The conceptual beauty of Popp's work is undeniable — from releasing buoys into the ocean that transmit positioning data back to their owners, to droplets of water forming into words as they fall, to tubes that traffic messages from the ether. Yet art is ultimately a visual endeavor, and must present its case to the eyes in order to persuade the mind. If the viewer is left to imagine how something works with the guidance of a weighty statement, she might, in her imagination, greatly improve upon the concept.

Julius Popp is represented by Dogenhaus Galerie in Leipzig, Germany.

The Harvard Natural History Museum

Our friends J and D rank the Harvard Natural History Museum as one of their two favorite Boston destinations, along with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Dinosaur and whale bones. A hummingbird collection. The world's largest collection of Victorian glass flowers.

This Ivy League museum is the very definition of old school exhibition style: all the specimens are tightly grouped, even stacked, in front of bright monochrome backgrounds. Without any environmental context whatsoever, the viewer is free to think about the animals however they wish, which makes for a wonderfully poetic exploration. Contemporary museums go to extremes to recreate appropriate environments for their stuffed specimens and often avoid the relationships that are so interesting. It's surprisingly refreshing to focus on just one thing, not the entire context.