Limning Unseens

A curated selection of 100 word reviews from Eutopia for Temporary Art Review.
This month’s selection is curated by Carolyn Sortor.

The UrbUrb: Patterns of Contemporary Living
Curators: Roy Brand, Keren Yeala-Golan, Ori Scialom and Edith Kofsky
Israel Pavilion, Venice Architectural Biennale 2014 [link] Venice, Italy

Accompanied by tinkling music grand plotters stutter and whir across beds of imported cultural sand, intricately etching diagrams derived from decades of urban, suburban and agrarian developments in Israel. Overlaid into illegible complexity the patterns present an evolution of enmeshed modern approaches to designed living, after which the sand is wiped clean: tabula rosa. Echoing issues of “design from above” universal modernism, the diagrams take on a hypnotic, alien character further abstracting architecture into an automated practice with scant concern for site or culture. Poetically dense The Urburb eschewed “excess-as-intelligence” and pedantic wall texts, elaborating manifold issues through succinct implementation.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of Sarale Gur Lavy

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Marco Maggi. Two Pages, 2015. Self-adhesive archival paper on wall. Dimensions variable.

Marco Maggi
Unfolding Marco Maggi
Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York [link] September 10 – October 24, 2015

Entering the work of Marco Maggi is not too unlike the dichotomous trajectory of a Zeno’s paradox where the elusive sight of knowledge always lies half a step ahead. The intriguing force of the granulated opalescent field that draws the gaze to its orbit is as though the intricate construction of signs that inscribe the space they inhabit, are the molecular building blocks of some gigantic meta-language; the pencils like the needles of a seismograph machine are there to record the slightest slippages and we’re brought in to witness the immaculate silence of language before it erupts into a scream.

~ Ali Soltani
Images courtesy of the artist and Josée Bienvenu Gallery

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Eli Gold
In Our Time
Art and Design Gallery, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS [link]

One enters In Our Time to find Eli Gold conducting a quiet concerto using his own heartbeat as the time signature and directing an orchestra of four performing various physical and contemplative activities. Using chalk as his baton, he meticulously tallies each beat onto a monumental chalkboard, the sound of which is amplified to the performers hidden from his view.

Taking on sound and repetition as his primary devices, Gold cleverly highlights the gap between fabricated clockwork and fluid time as experience, while his inclusion of other performers evokes existential questions of the individual’s distinctive abilities to influence temporal perception.

~Eli Blasko
photographs courtesy of  Aaron Paden

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Markus Schinwald
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
jointly organized with SFMOMA [link] September 09 – December 13, 2014

Like an endoscope moving around a membrane, viewers in Markus Shwinwald’s amusing site-specific installation must proceed around walls, bars and other physical barriers to view a network of objects and images that address interconnected themes of the body. Altered 19^thcentury paintings, adapted table legs, and other bits and pieces morph in and out of each other like muscles, bones and limbs. The objects mystify; the journey through the exhibition can feel aimless, but it rewards those who like to dwell in the imagination creating connections between things that (like disparate body parts) do not stand as strong alone.

~Janeil Englestad
Images courtesy of Wattis Institute, San Francisco.
Photos by Johnna Arnold.