Blonde One Eyed Man Tavern Clerk Owner Fantasy Art
Critic's Pick
Nina Katchadourian'south Eccentric Existentialism
In her first show at Stride, an artist driven by curiosity and a penchant for the absurd tries to sympathize the globe. The results are touching and sometimes hilarious.
Nina Katchadourian is a sculptor, a printmaker, a lensman, a performance artist, a video creative person, a sound artist — only more whatsoever of those things she is an creative person with a voracious curiosity and a marathoner'south stamina when it comes to running with an idea. In her first show at Stride Gallery, "Cumulus," she offers up vii projects that are witty, sometimes even guffaw-inducing. But don't let that fool you: Underneath the playfulness lurk some pretty fundamental questions virtually how we organize knowledge to make sense of our by and present.
The New York- and Berlin-based artist is a Conceptualist at heart, just in the imaginative vein of Eleanor Antin, with whom she studied at the University of California San Diego in the early '90s, rather than the dry out seriousness of a Sol LeWitt. But similar LeWitt, she is a fan of setting up a proposition and carrying it through endlessly. Some of the works at Pace were begun in the earliest days of her xxx-odd-twelvemonth career. Many oasis't been shown in New York since their showtime iterations; others are having their New York debuts.
"Paranormal Postcards" was conceived 20 years ago when, on an airport layover in Oslo, Katchadourian decided to sew a ruby-red thread on a postcard, connecting the hands of a person pictured on a fjord to each of the cruise ships sailing in the water below, in a way that created a mysterious empathy among them. Since then, the artist has been gathering postcards from her travels and repeating the gesture to where she now has hundreds of embellished images.
Every time the piece is installed she reorganizes her drove, with dotted red lines connecting the cards on the gallery walls, creating a taxonomy that seems straight out of a Borges short story.
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In one group, lighthouses and towers and the Statue of Liberty'due south torch are connected to boats; in another, hot-air balloons are tethered to the basis with red embroidery floss.
Then in that location are the museum postcards, in which the hands of the shipwrecked in a reproduction of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa" are all tied to the white flag of one of their lot, who waves to a tiny ship on the horizon. The hands of Balinese dancers, Ganesh statues, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Giacometti sculptures play games of true cat's cradle. The complicated webs hint at strange, sometimes inscrutable undercurrents in otherwise anodyne images.
"Paranormal Postcards" is part travel log, role investigation into the ofttimes arbitrary ways we allocate and categorize data. The thought is at the middle of another projection in the show, "Sorted Books," that Katchadourian has been working on since 1993. Information technology involves creating establish poesy from the titles of books she finds in people'due south personal libraries. The version at Stride was made this twelvemonth, at the invitation of the Isamu Noguchi Museum.
"What Is Mod Sculpture?/Brancusi/Noguchi/Marcel Duchamp/Why Duchamp/The Third Dimension" reads one stack — maybe advisable for a collection of the famed modernist sculptor. "This Time of Morning/Oh, My Aching Back/Your Prostate"/The Unfashionable Homo Trunk," on the other hand, offers a chip too much insight into how Noguchi dealt with the travails of aging.
"The Genealogy of the Supermarket" (2005-) is part taxonomy, function family tree. The e'er-expanding piece is composed of the faces that grace grocery shop products, from the Hair for Men guy to the Red Baron of deep dish pizza fame to the stoical grandmother featured on the label of Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp.
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Again, Katchadourian takes advantage of the credible authority of data visualization — information technology's in a chart, so it must be truthful — to create putative relationships betwixt figures whose origins span fourth dimension, space and culture. (At each installation on its bout, Katchadourian scours local markets to add to the clan.) By displaying these portraits in austerity store picture frames and hanging them on ornate, fake-flocked ruby-red wallpaper, she takes them out of the realm of product blueprint and commerce and lodges them tenderly but firmly in our own families and homes.
Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and the kneeling Native American adult female on Land O'Lakes butter appear, though their images are mounted behind semi-opaque plexiglass to bespeak their "passing" — their respective companies have retired them because of changing sensitivities most racist stereotypes. Babies go from blond-haired and bluish-eyed to more than racially ambiguous — ad's attempts to appeal to an increasingly diverse client base. "The Genealogy of the Supermarket" may offset as a i-liner merely ends up operation as a snapshot of contemporary attitudes.
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Elsewhere, an intaglio impress titled "Lucy'due south Sampler" (2020), suggests how complicated the notion of family can be, specially in the wake of war. The paradigm is an exact translation into printmaking techniques of an embroidery sampler fabricated past a young girl orphaned in the Armenian genocide. She was adopted by the artist's grandparents and became, as Katchadourian explains in a text below the paradigm, her "bonus grandmother." Katchadourian's reverent duplication of Lucy's gestures becomes a touching recognition of her beginnings.
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The poignancy of "Accent Elimination" sneaks up on you. The half-dozen-channel video was included in the award winning Armenian Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale and is being exhibited in New York for the first time since then. On one side, iii monitors show the artist, her female parent and her father, each speaking from scripts written by her parents that recount their origins and how they ended up meeting.
But here's the twist: everyone speaks in the accent of another. Katchadourian emulates by turn the Swedish-inflected Finnish accent of her mother and the Armenian-by-way-of-Turkey-and-Beirut accent of her father, while her parents attempt to master the apartment American intonation of their daughter. On another side, three monitors evidence the iii working with an accent coach to perfect the subtleties of the varied pronunciations.
Their efforts are sincere — every artist should have parents as game as Katchadourian's. Simply even they crack up occasionally during filming. Their laughter leavens everything that hovers in the groundwork of their accounts, including the generational consequences of genocide and flight.
Like all the works in the evidence, the good-natured charm of "Accent Elimination" opens onto deeper lessons about the ways in which the elementary human action of mapping fifty-fifty the most personal or fanciful histories can illuminate our shared civilization, including the incomprehensible parts of information technology.
Nina Katchadourian: Cumulus
Through June 26, Step Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, Manhattan; pacegallery.com.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/arts/design/nina-katchadourian-pace-artist.html
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