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Kara Walker.
Occupation of Alexandria, 2005. Offset Lithography/Silkscreen, 39x53in (paper size), Carrier: Somerset Textured, ed: 35, Portfolio of 15.
Kara Walker is a polemical figure in the world of contemporary art. Few artists of the past quarter century have polarized the art world, and the black community, as much as she. Her 2005 portfolio of prints Harper's Pictorial History Of the Civil War (Annotated) on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum is an extension of the aggressive, challenging, and sometimes mystifying work that has made her renowned in contemporary art circles. By using enlarged photo reproductions drawn directly from the 19th. century book (also on view) of the same name, Walker places us in the visual and factual description of the landscape in which the narratives in her imagination occur.
Because the responses to Kara Walker are often intense, discussions of her work infrequently revolve around the formal characteristics themselves. If they were to, they likely would not be lengthy conversations. Kara Walker has succeeded in creating an inimitable style for herself that is actually based on little formal growth and innovation. Though an excellent draftsman in her own right, Walker is most closely associated with the stark silhouettes that comprise the bulk of her oeuvre, and it is this work with variations that have comprised the majority of her creative output for the past 12 years. Her brand is now so distinct and instantly recognizable, that to deviate from it would probably spell critical or commercial suicide.
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Shilpa Gupta.
Untitled (There is No Border Here), 2006. Wall Drawing with Self Adhesive Tape, 118x118in. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
While Shilpa Gupta's exhibition A Bit Closer at the Contemporary Arts Center is richly varied in the considered materials she employs for each work, at its core, it is a sophisticated conceptual project that draws large-scale political problems down to a human level through this collection of works. The six artworks on display draw comparisons between disputes that are found between neighboring countries (India and Pakistan might be suggested at times) and within interpersonal relationships. Considering the persistent preoccupation with borderlines in Gupta's exhibition, the adroit irony to her take on these problems is that they are ultimately illusory, that our differences and conflicts are our own fearful inventions.
Although her series of sculptures, sound and video works converse over fairly controversial issues in global politics, Gupta's objects are firstly elegant and beautiful. Do these aesthetics render her assertions unhelpfully oblique? Hardly. Suspended within deftly elegant installations, Gupta's observations on injustice are situated among other traits in the work. To believe that politics can be isolated from the overwhelming context of social stimuli in which they are integrated may have a 'book smart' appeal. And thank God for historians and political scientists who attempt to comb apart the complexities of human drama. In contrast, Gupta's exhibition is 'street smart,' espousing a conviction that such issues are only fully and accurately understood when experienced in the total bittersweetness of their interconnectedness with cultural aesthetics, formalist experiments and our sensual impressions of our own realities.
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Sungsoo Kim.
Rediscovery 100306 (2009). Kiln cast glass, 12.5"h x 9.5"w x 5"d. Photo Courtesy of the Marta Hewitt Gallery.
The beautiful glass sculptures of Sungsoo Kim, on exhibit at the Marta Hewitt gallery through May 15th, communicate formal geometrical simplicity and radiant colors. The vague familiarity about his forms arises from their casting from a mold made directly of a source styrofoam packing material. The source form is not always recognizable in the pieces on display (I find that the more this is the case, the more successful the work). For example, one may imagine that the styrofoam of
Rediscovery 100306 (2009) was perhaps used, paradoxically, to protect fragile glass bottles. Here it appears in delicate rose colors, the form doubled and raised on its smallest side.
Rediscovery 100302 (2009), in bright yellow, is similarly placed vertically. The source form's original function may well have held a computer part in the square center, whereas its other negative spaces (the circles) were perhaps designed to lessen the volume of styrofoam for impact absorption. These negative spaces
in the sculpture serve as compelling visual aspects for the eye to explore, for they allow the glass to create tonal variations via the overlapping effect of the multiplied surfaces (i.e. the yellow takes on darker hues in the circular spaces, creating deep golden tones). This is something that styrofoam, left alone as such, would not achieve.
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Kara Walker: Memory and Meaning
