The show commences with “The Human Figure in Space,” a gridded and mirrored lab-exploring image and (appropriately enough) one’s own human figure in motion. Yet, the human figure moves into an altogether different and inglorious space in the work that follows. “Landscape with Fall of Icarus” is composed of five video monitors displaying what seems like various scenes pilfered from the libraries of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Mud is splattered, parachutes collapse, all in a jarringly slow-frame rate that destroys the viewer’s persistent vision of motion, confounding whether to see the work as either still image or video. However intentional, it all seems pathetic, a spectacle of failure and idle strength (daresay a theater of stupidity). In this sense there is a bridge to the following piece, “Sleeper,” first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2005. In a two-hour video, the bear–suited Wallinger romps one evening through the glassy Modernist lobby of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. The work is stated to explore the all-encompassing “isolation, politics, humor and nationalism of Berlin’s troubled past,” and whatever its sardonic level of discernment, falls slow and pathetic much like the work that it preceded. The world shown may very well be as feeble as Wallinger makes it seem, yet this sad reality does little to make this work any more interesting. (Lisa Larson-Walker) Through Febreuary 28 at Donald Young Gallery
For Us: A Review of "Something from Something" at Engage Projects Kushala Vora and Adia Sykes’ collaboration "Something from Something" tells us as viewers that knowledge, art, creation, inspiration, love—really anything you can think of—has a place of origin.
