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 atmospheres 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-outlined 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
One of my favorite parts of this review is how you included what it feels like to be in the room with the work. However, I would have liked to hear more about the entire exhibition and how the pieces functioned together. This review has lots of great description, but it seems to be a review of a single piece rather than an entire show. Maybe you could also expand on what you mean when you say it has a “maternal character.” One detail to note: the gallery website lists the title of the piece as “Pulse Topology”, not “Topography.”
ReplyDeleteThis review was almost as immersive as Lozano-Hemmer's immersive experience. You included some very helpful describing words when you spoke about the warm light beats, rumbling surround-sound speakers as well as making sure the reader fully understood just how grand the installation was when you mentioned the "cascading grid of 3000 vertically suspended light bulbs". I also really enjoyed the connection you made between Lozano-Hemmer's upbringing and his work at the beginning of the review. I would watch out for run-on sentences so the reader can slow down a bit and fully immerse themselves in the description almost as much as they would if they were physically present.
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ReplyDeleteThis review highlights the primary investigative qualities of Rafeal Lozano-Hemmer’s work and core components of what drives this installation. The descriptive aspects provide an elusive idea of the visuals that are present in the Pace Gallery, pushing the viewer to have question as to what exactly the installation is – this is important in our reading as the art should not be “all-told” and leave room for the reader/viewer to be encouraged of their own curiosities and seek out travel to this installation. As far as anything that may need revision, there does seem to be more emphasis on the light-based installation than with the water-vapor sculpture – balancing the size of description would be useful to extracting the positive qualities of this review.