Common Measures Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

 

Common Measures

Pace Gallery 

510 West 25th St. 

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Common Measures explores the affinity between human reflection and technology of the 21st century. 

Son of Mexico City night-club owners, Lozano-Hemmer understands the nuance of curating atmosphere​s that direct individuals’ senses towards one integrated experience. He marries intricately designed, interactive technology with human habitation to prompt a visceral understanding of harmony in his theatrical installation, Pulse Topology. The immersive piece mimics viewers’ live heartbeats throughout the darkened Pace ground-floor gallery using a cascading grid of 3000 vertically suspended light bulbs and the rumbling of surround-sound speakers. Waves of light beat out from bulb-o​​utlined covers, where a participant is invited to stand. For a moment, it's hard to recognize the sounds of your body broadcasted at such a large and vulnerable scale, by the artificial beating of a sensor’s data stream. The collection of these beating IDs (which display a breathtaking amount of personality in pulse and rhythm,) are not stored forever; new participant’s pulses replace the old, proposing a bond between human and artificial life through the onset of an ultimate end. This senescence is mirrored in Call on Water, a fountain using water vapor to display phrases of poetry by Octavio Paz, legible only until it evaporates. Harmonium, a streaming of ocean waves depicted in acronyms of hormones, runs on a 90-year span of human biological rhythms, experiencing, itself, the ebbs and flows of hormones throughout humans’ daily life. His work mimics the energy flow of the “natural” world, inviting us into its living space, its womb. Lozano-Hemmer employs surveillance and data collection for building a refreshingly maternal environment.

- Maggie

Antoni Tàpies’ Pace Gallery

A self-taught artist as well as a theorist and philosopher, Antoni Tàpies’ exhibition at Pace Gallery features twenty paintings that explore his unique artistic language through the themes of materiality and cultural allusions. The work in the exhibition represents Tàpies’s interest in sex, defiance, death, erasure, and the aging body through time. During his seven-decade career, Tàpies’ work employs an amalgamation of physical materials as well as symbols of spirituality gathered from Eastern and Western cultures. Additionally, many of these pieces allude to both his personal and political difficulties in his native Catalonia. Using various media and gestures, he experiments with atypical processes through layering with striking textures and color. Media such as dirt, cardboard, fabrics, furniture, or spray paint are evident within the work, and his highly physical processes and explorations of textures, materiality, and color are explored in various pieces. For example, his painting “Manta amb petjades,” in 2001, features a blanket glued on wood. Tàpies utilizes the natural folds of the blanket and retains the materiality of this media even after gluing it onto the wooden board. The contrast between the organic blanket and the wooden board and the jarring black paint layered above the material exemplifies Tàpies’ inclination to play with different, physical media. Overall, this exhibition highlights his raw explorations and exposes viewers to physical approaches to art-making. 

-yujin

Esther Pearl Watson: Guardian of Eden

Artworks made of glitter glue and aluminum foil seem more suited to a kindergarten classroom than a Lower East Side gallery, but Esther Pearl Watson's work disputes this. In her solo exhibition, “Guardian of Eden” on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery, the artist creates bright, shimmering landscapes dotted with UFOs, cows, and depictions of everyday life growing up in Texas. Watson’s flat acrylic renderings, creates narrative surrounding the artist's father’s incessant attempts at creating a UFO to sell to NASA when she was growing up, and how this obsession led to a life of poverty. In “A High Frequency Sandwich - 1986” a large triangle, reminiscent of a chopped up disco ball, is pasted on top of a deep blue sky decorated with stars. In the foreground is a field dotted with cattle and flowers. Centered in the frame is a sparkling donkey covered in glitter that seems to be floating up into the UFO. The artist’s inclusion these craft-like materials and bright, punchy colors is deliberate; they create a gilded adolescent perspective to depict a time of uncertainty in her childhood that transforms into wonder and hope. Esther Pearl Watson’s work reclaims childish media and employs radiant colors, creating a tactile and enticing narrative throughout the gallery.

-Katherine DeFelice

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