The Fall 2014 Artists-in-Residence exhibition at Artpace is a study in taxonomy, and a fine example of the curatorial ideal that work exists in conversation. Most surprising, the work that seems at first the least pre-possessing possesses tremendous power; not just as a series of beautiful objects, but as an utterance about the gallery experience.
Tokyo-based Takashi Arai combines the up-to-the-moment photo tech of a GoPro camera hurtling toward earth, in contrast with his daguerrotypes’ careful slivers of silvery ghosts. Adam Helms, from New York, functions as a curator of his own compulsive internet research, but also the demanding details of photogravure. Austin’s Anna Krachey marshals her elegant techniques and preoccupations to work on the viewer in the moment and in doing so flips the script; there’s no and-then, and-then, and-then, just right now.
Mika Yoshitake, the curator of the Fall 2014 program, is an assistant curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Los Angeles. She has coordinated exhibitions of Ai Weiwe and Takashi Murakami and has also written catalogue essays for the Guggenheim, Dia Art Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art. Tyler Green, writing for Artinfo, said of her position at the Hirshhorn, “By all accounts recent hire Mika Yoshitake is a potential star.” She shines in this exhibition.
By curating the work of Arai, Krachey and Helms, Yoshitake demonstrates a nuanced approach to cultural history and a profound understanding of how it intersects with the technological history of photographic image-making.
Takashi Arai: Silverplated
The initial focus point of Arai’s work is a single-channel video loop of an air bombing. They’re not weapons exactly; these are stand-in pumpkins falling from a plane, crashing to the ground. Which is funny, but effectively refers to the brutality of military onslaught.
Lining the walls are contemporary examples of daguerrotypes, the primitive and miraculous technique of exposing iodized silver to light. Arai’s are portraits; of the U.S. combat planes used to bomb Japan, of elderly survivors of the atomic bombing at Nagasaki, etched and silvery, beings existing in our current timeframe, who doled out or suffered the worst of a 20th-century war, etched onto our eyes using the 19th-century technology.
Arai says, “The daguerreotype, irreproducible and etched by the light emanating from a particular place—its surface literally carved in 100-nanometer relief—I call it as a ‘micro-monument’… My mission is to break down massive issues into [the] observable world of individuals, with the extraordinary details and durability of daguerreotype.”
Adam Helms: Weight of Culture
Adam Helms uses an “outdated” photographic technique as well: photogravure, in which copper plates covered in gelatin record the image by means of incision. Helms applies this technique to several hundred images with more compositional than thematic resonance. The reproduced images Helms puts together sidestep narrative and instead allegorize Helms’ fixation on a unifying theme of pathos. Some wall pieces are like high school yearbooks of the damned; a lineup of hooded Satanists abut a shot of eyeless, uniformed cult members next to a cluster of torture victims. It’s not just the Manson Family, the KKK and Guantanamo, but the cold sickness they share.
And you don’t get to look at these wall-mounted careful collages until you walk through a walled-in hallway of space, where both sides function as individual galleries. Also, the “hallway” entrance walls are painted in Technicolor bands. It’s very The Wizard of Oz, or Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain; both references (or, really, whatever references you make) open you to the wall-mounted collection of pictures Helms combed the internet and his book collection for.
Helms told an Artpace interviewer that “there are no specific narratives I am seeking to create, only the impulse of the viewer to possibly seek one for themselves. In this way each image, or series of images, can carry a certain ‘weight’ to the relationship the viewer brings to the gallery.”
Anna Krachey: Blue/Black
Krachey writes, in her Artpace presentation, “I see my work as one continuous body, not grouped into series.”
In her installation, she accomplishes this really cleverly. During the press preview, she spoke of her weariness of the “normal” viewing in galleries; stand before one work, “get a read on it,” side-step to the next. She has subverted this by posing her photographs together, encompassing one corner. You determine where your eyes go, taking in her brass-surfaced corner mirror, her images of horses, her harmonious color sense and exquisite detail, all images close in size and close together. It borders on the filmic, or the kind of comic book composition that encourages your gaze to roam, and then linger.
Krachey displays some 3D objects, too, handmade (by Krachey) leather sculptural furniture; neat little child-sized stools, a witty lawn chair. These, you have to orbit. Her work is undeniably beautiful, desirable; but what’s genius is a command over your attention that also allows the mind to breathe. There’s no side step, look, side-step, just a self-paced reverie of absorption.
International Artists-in-Residence, Free, Artpace, 445 N Main, (210) 212-4900, artpace.org. Through Jan 11
This article appears in A Sustainable Future?.