Peggy Franck: drawing from a Store of thought, Kimberly Clark: Temporary Devotion, Aharon Ozery: “No sky no earth- but still snowflakes fall, SODA_JER

Peggy Franck: drawing from a Store of thought, Kimberly Clark: Temporary Devotion, Aharon Ozery: "No sky no earth- but still snowflakes fall, SODA_JERK: Astro Black, Künstlerhaus bethanien gmbh Exhibition Spaces Kottbuser Straße 10 25^th March-17^th April 2011. by craniv boyd.

 

Franck: Bright colors like neon and painterly gestures on new material surfaces such as semi transparent one directional mirrors are all well and good, Perspex and plexi and rolled sheet acrylic are in and of them selves fine and friendly as materials, their newness and relative limited expressive range can pose an issue for artists when they are seduced by technological advances in light weight construction materials. You can weld and melt and warp and break all this plexi glass heat forming your path towards a world of neo-baroque inevitable plastic explosion in the first decades of the twenty first century, that involved and heat intensive tactic could be one way of battling the distance and cold hardness that plexi and plastic like other synthetic materials like it carry with them. Dutch born Peggy Franck does not choose this path. In her work which is to be read as output of consistent praxis and process plexi glass figures in the same way paper would as two dimensional formal surface, bright colors are applied to objects and the disparate elements of panel, pane or surface act flat and are flat some what disappointingly so for a public seeking another installment of the love saga between two and three dimensions. Space and volume are absent only hinted at weakly with bright colors painted in broad strokes in scatter about reason without rhyme hanging methodology. The third dimension it almost totally oppressed by the second, begging the question is this installation created with the graphic designers approach or sensibility to volume?

 

Clark: If Mark Zuckerberg made artwork would it look like this? Chances are slim of that, Dutch artists Eveline van de Griend, Iris van Dongen and Ellemieke Schoenmaker have been working together as artist collaborative or fictive persona Kimberly Clark for only two years less than Zuckerberg created the Facebook. Nihilism and drunken antics persist in a slide show and video montage with blinking stuttering red and white bold face type techno electronic music is the soundtrack. A leggy woman is dancing around holding her head Ichabod Crane, or the ghost of the dead Hessian Soldier attends a cocktail party in sleepy hollow wearing a mini skirt. The slide show digital photographs are entrenched in the bacchanalia photographs that crop up on coed social networking profile pages. People pose and smile to the camera in nocturnal scenes in various European capitals unawares that the party photo they took with the headless brunette with shapely legs in high-heels was using their souvenir as an art project. This could be a case of thirty something year old girls from Holland gone wild, yet the gross out factor and Northern renaissance tradition for the gruesome is too prevalent to be simply titillation. We are taken from a loop of the headless woman sitting and dancing in hotel room soaking in glam decor, does she move with Saint Vitus dance or out of ennui? There are some strange subculturesque arty looking party video with Ichabod Crane in heels dancing with other freaks in the culture production tribe, Ichabod Crane in heels then goes shopping so as to have a horrid juxtaposition between her decapitated head she holds and the Chanel hand bag accessories she prances around commentary on rampant niche consumerism perchance by showing up in a zombie state to shop.  This video loop is one component of Kimberly Clark's Temporary devotion, self-referential title remains to be seen if this was intended. Indeed in an organism with low life expectancy rates the artist collective where rates of attrition can be high like a Heavy Metal music group temporary devotion is a prerequisite. Other parts of the practice of Kimberly Clark include a kind of dynamic rehabilitation of Duane Hanson; a life like woman fully clothed is in the process of vaulting a fence a decapitated doppelganger is nearby. There is also the small art bar, this is comical and successful in that it smells authentic yet is not overdone in the stale scent of old drink. On the Path from the Dynamic zombie tableaux to the video montage towards the obscure Berlin Bar revisited there are a hand dryer with motion sensor and a urinal mounted on the wall. The hand dryer is complacent of the prevalent bathroom humor because it is decked out in black lacy women's knickers. R. Mutt had some trouble urinating after he left the artists bar on can tell by the red Catsup stylistically adorning the urinal on the wall across the entrance to the bar in a box the size of half a shipping container.

 

Ozery: Do androids dream of electric sheep? The distopic æsthetic proposition posed in grand scale by Israeli Artist Aharon Ozery calls to mind the title of science fiction novel by American author Philip K. Dick, a work more known to the movie going public of the 1980's as "Blade Runner". The work is large and the multiform aluminum tubes suspended in a cube evokes a cats cradle or overblown pick up sticks fashion in turn the sculpture elicits an order of functionless childhood game or interior of strange earthbound space craft. "No sky no earth- but still snowflakes fall" appears as if it could be a world machine built by aliens. The title alludes to a future where our planet in the solar system is disappeared, our blue skies by default in the same oblivion our planet went off to yet winter time weather persists.

 

Jerk: Identity confusion is a result of what could be called visually samplings from beyond the post colonial. Perchance it is a cold space from which Astro Black comes, a video cycle that is self referential and heavily steeped in hip hop culture so as to become kitsch for the Rapper and Black studies Urban intellectual yet at the same time is so rigorous and technically advances so as to become a seamless collage of time based media, so if Hannah Höch or John Heartfield lived today and had access to You Tube and final cut express they could conceivably create a kind of insider humorous allegory on race relations and hip hop culture that artist collaborative Soda_Jerk has created in their work Astro Black. Which brings me to the point of being an American, takes one to know one or some such saying, in Astro Black there is a subtle kind of outsiders perspective and exotic otherness at play, the author seems to choose source video like actor Laurence Fishburn in his sun be speckled character in the matrix and some stock footage of Ronald Reagan holding a speech as president, a blending of the space ship landing from science fiction film Independence Day and a music video of Public Enemy and Flavor Flav "fighting the power" as you will in 1990's Manhattan due north of central park, has some thing un-American to it in its hyper Americana. So as to say too enthralled with the sub-cultural exports of the U.S.A to be made by some body who grew up with this particular order of diversity right front and center, it has something of the child who could not make it to the block-party therein lies a kind of relaxed and lenient approach to charged cultural references. The exacting precision in post-production errs on the pedantic, obsessive or Mannerist, perhaps we are embarking on an era of mannerist time based works in the cinema.  The stance that is more redolent with sunny continent of Oceania where the sister, sister collaboration of Dan and Dominique Angeloro come from. By craniv boyd.