Columbus, Ohio Art Pilgrimage

About a month ago, Hannah and I trekked to Columbus, Ohio to see two exhibitions and hang out with our friends, Kevin and Mary at our favorite Indian restaurant.

Fiber: Sculpture 1960 - Present at the Wexner was the main destination and it did not disappoint. Highlights include:

Elsi Giauque's Spatial Element from 1979 (see link for a better installation photo)

Ernesto Neto's Soundway from 2012 (with metal bells and seed pods)

Faith Wilding's Crocheted Environment, 1995 (image via). The depictions of Wilding's installation online are varied - the one below is more accurate in terms of the lighting and scale we witnessed at the Wexner but it is far easier to see the shapes and the way it was installed in the documentation above.

 (image via)

Françoise Grossen's knotted Inchworm, 1970 (image via)

No trip to the Wexner is complete without spending time in the bookstore and two of these were acquired to bring back to our respective houses. It was a fitting purchase since many of the artworks we saw were based on grid structures and mathematics.

  

 

Alison Rossiter at the Columbus College of Art and Design was the biggest surprise and I have since shown her photographs and website to many people out of sheer love for the formal qualities and sequencing she creates from the ghostly remains of photographic paper long past expiration. The image above and the three below are snapshots from her exhibition Light.

For more information about Alison's work see this link (I have spent a great deal of time lamenting the fact that the CCAD website is as poor as the Ball State School of Art's in terms of finding information easily).

Sitter, an exhibition of portraiture at CCAD featured new and old work by Kelli Connell including The Field from the series Double Life:

I was also interested in how Nina Katchadourian presented her iPhone photographs of Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.

I am looking forward to another road trip to Columbus this summer to see Catherine Opie's Portraits and Landscapes. Long live my Wexner membership.

"Landfall" - Laurie Anderson and the Kronos Quartet

Last weekend, Hannah and I drove to the Wexner Center to experience Landfall. My previous encounter with the Kronos Quartet was watching them behind a screen with Phillip Glass as they performed Dracula in Houston, Texas. I once saw Laurie Anderson perform Live in New York in Vancouver, Washington where not a face in the crowd had dry eyes as she described NYC post 9/11. I could not imagine an event more worth traveling to despite it being a hectic time of the semester.

Surprisingly, Hannah and I were two of the youngest people in the audience (though I envied the ten year old boy who was there with his father). The performance was beyond description and I am still trying to find the words to process what we saw. The core of the story featured Hurricane Sandy and one of the most memorable parts was the finale when Anderson described walking into her studio basement to see keyboards, archival papers, and photographs of her dog floating in brown, murky water. These three sentences were projected on the screen above the Kronos Quartet moments before the show ended: "How beautiful. How magic. And how catastrophic." Those words describe many of Anderson's stories whether or not they are related to a horrific event.

Anderson spoke of a list of millions of animals that are now extinct. As their names and locations last found (remains discovered) scrolled by, one cannot help but think how many more in our lifetime will be added. I am mesmerized with each story Anderson tells of animals, as they often feature disaster. Once, I created an artwork based on her description of birds and I keep wondering if anything will come from this event.

Jacinda Russell, From The Lost Photographs, 2003-2005

Laurie reminded us that human beings were not the only ones that lost their lives the day the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center. Birds, burning, their bodies seared, also fell to the ground amidst the flesh and debris.

The Return to Columbus, Ohio with the ArtSpeak Critique Class

Back to the Wexner Center for the Arts to see the Double Sexus exhibition with Hannah's and my critique class. Hans Bellmer's La Poupee (below) was on display. As much as I loved seeing the actual doll, I'm fairly certain Bellmer would have preferred that his audience only view the photographs. I didn't take any pictures of the beautiful welded tables that held the smaller, hand-colored images but dream of using a method of display like them in the future.



Rist's The Tender Room was much more visible during the evening last week. Although I liked seeing the pink panels on the windows in all their glory, I preferred the space dark to view the projections more easily.



Rist's video feed on the ceiling of the women's restroom.



Andy Hinck displaying every color in the spectrum in the entry of the Wexner.



A very intense game of Duckie Checkers at the Columbus Museum of Art exhibitions Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph and Fur, Fins, and Feathers.

Wexner Center for the Arts Part One

Off to see Pipilotti Rist (above) talk about her new installation The Tender Room at the Wexner this evening. Plus "perverted objects" in the Double Sexus exhibition of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeouis' artwork. Art in the flesh! Yay!


Hans Bellmer (I haven't seen his work in person since working at the Center for Creative Photography).


Louise Bourgeois's Paris retrospective in 1995 bumped her up into my top 10 favorite artists.