Pages

100 words - Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms

Cai Guo-Qiang: Fallen Blossoms: Explosion Project
In the span of human history, an individual life blazes up and quickly extinguishes. A life of renown perhaps shines more brightly, leaving behind spots in the eyes, a billow of smoke, but is still transient, immaterial. By igniting a lotus blossom, symbol of spiritual awakening, pure beauty rising above murky waters, Guo-Qiang pays tribute to a fleeting life of artistic leadership and vision. Covering the museum’s facade for a single afternoon, the memorial both illuminates and violates the temple behind, highlighting its grandeur and invoking its vulnerability. Uncollectable, unrepeatable, the artwork sharply contrasts the assumption of institutional permanence embodied in the museum.

(At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, December 11, 2009.)

100 words - Bruce Nauman: Days

Bruce Nauman: Days
Who hasn’t felt the distortions of time? The way a single afternoon drags on, one painful minute after the next, while a whole month flies by in a blinding flash. “Days” captures both monotony and unpredictability, repetition and endless flow. A diverse array of disembodied voices melds into moments of communal synchronicity, into a mindless, meditative chant. Time. Time. Time. Ticking by, measured and chaotic, specific and generalized. The doubling of each voice across the aisle builds layers, alternate dimensions, by which the world is randomly deconstructed and reordered and then finds clarity in a rare moment of near unison.

(At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 21, 2009, to April 4, 2010.)

Installation shots at Finlandia University

A few images of my show "Remnants and Residual Memories," on display at the Finlandia University Gallery through February 11, 2010.