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Karthik Pandian:Reversal
3/16/2013 - 6/1/2013 |
    
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Karthik Pandian’s Reversal (2013) is an image and sound installation for a completely darkened room delineated by a grey theatrical curtain and consisting of a 65” plasma monitor and 6 speakers. The piece is composed of 113 still images that Karthik Pandian shot on dead stock Agfa Scala 200X 35mm black and white slide film. The stills are cycled in an aleatory mode by a custom computer program that applies the cinematographic effect of a still image in motion, also known as the Ken Burns effect. Red rectangular shapes, set in motion by the image program, travel across the screen in different directions and speeds and remain equally unpredictable in their size and frequency.
The sound of Reversal is similarly based on chance calculation, with 6 speakers set in 2 triangular configurations in the room, and from which a set of 6 synthesized tones is played. The sound is not recorded but generated by a program as it runs, producing different lines of sound moving across the room, structuring the space with an invisible architecture. Because the elements are played and presented at random, exact repetition is almost impossible in the piece.
In an important shift from the medium of the film, the image in Reversal is not being projected but is sourced in real time, adding to the dematerialization of the film as a tangible reality. All this reinforces the tension between the paintings, sculptures and ready-made objects seen in the white cube gallery space downstairs and the digitized analog imagery presented in the black box room upstairs.
The subject of Reversal is a performance that Pandian staged for the camera in a black box theater in Chicago, without an audience. In the first take, performers assumed the roles of artistic archetypes (such as painter, poet, and dancer) with actions that were determined by the roll of the dice. In the second take, the performers attempted to mimic the first sequence of actions, playing with the dichotomy between structure and improvisation, rehearsal and repertory.
To view the documentation of Reversal, visit our Vimeo page at www.vimeo.com/63344123
Password: hoffman118
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Fred Sandback
Sculptures
4/26/2013 - 6/1/2013
Exhibited concurrently with Sol LeWitt: Concrete Block Structure is the solo exhibition Fred Sandback: Sculptures. In 1986 Sandback, in looking back over twenty years of a consistent art practice, wrote "The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire was the outline of a rectangular solid . . . lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me." This exhibition marks the 6th solo exhibition for the artist at Rhona Hoffman Gallery and the gallery is featuring sculptures that span the period from 1976 to 2002.
The sculptures are composed of acrylic yarn, a material that for Sandback held no significant associations. The yarn’s soft, fuzzy profile invokes a less crisp line than that produced by other mediums, and its fiber makeup absorbs rather than reflects light. The resulting effect allows for a seamless and symbiotic relationship between the material, its composition and the site it inhabits. The mutable character of any Sandback sculpture is relative to its site, and its proportions are calibrated in response to the site’s architecture. While the line of yarn never posits to be more than a line, the linear imagination of the viewer envisions a plane. Trajectory, ascent and descent (the inherent qualities of a line) subside as the vibration of the invisible planes take precedence. The otherwise elusive void or vacancy is given form, illustrating Sandback’s ability to reveal the relationships between the incorporeal and concrete, the ethereal and the tangible.
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Sol Lewitt
Concrete Block Structure
4/26/2013 - 6/1/2013
Three dimensional art of any kind is a physical fact. This physicality is its most obvious and expressive content. Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions. The physicality of a three-dimensional object then becomes a contradiction to its non-emotive intent.
- Sol LeWitt
Rhona Hoffman Gallery is pleased to present two solo exhibitions, Sol Lewitt: Concrete Block Structure and Fred Sandback: Sculptures.
In 1985, Sol LeWitt’s first cement Cube was built in a park in Basel, Switzerland and marked the debut of a series of experiments with concrete block structures. The choice of material originated during LeWitt’s residence in Umbria, Italy in the early eighties. For LeWitt, the concrete block satisfied his quest for a material that was common and accessible. Aligned with his development of a single idea through multiple modular method of construction, the concrete block became a new module like the square or cube of previous works. The modest building component conjures an association to architectural necessity as opposed to considered formal design. The material is wrought with contradictions: impenetrable yet vulnerable, unfinished yet resolved, grounded yet mobile. LeWitt’s concrete block structures were more public than his previous three-dimensional work, not only in their locations but also in their reference to history and archaeological memory. The concrete block structure on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Negative Pyramid, references the mausoleums and temples of Egypt and pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. Yet, born against the backdrop of a “countermonument” trend of the eighties, the concrete block structures resist direct connection to any specific event. Negative Pyramid proposes a passage to an indeterminate destination. Its terraced formation presents a grid or map measuring the intervals between one potential point in space and another. Its orientation in the gallery suggests site-specificity, differentiating it from its original installation in Galerie Pièce Unique in Paris in 1997.
Also visible from the street and exhibited in the building’s hallway is Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 644, first installed in the Galleria Ugo Ferranti in Rome in 1990. Using color ink wash and pencil, this Wall Drawing is another example of LeWitt’s use of a formula composed of a vocabulary of elementary forms and techniques. Executed directly on the wall from a set of precise instructions, the drawing integrates the draftsman’s decisions and references the architecture of the site. Sol LeWitt: Concrete Block Structure is the gallery’s thirteenth solo exhibition of LeWitt’s work.
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