|
 E-Mail
This Article
Akio Ohki, Taiwan 1971-1978
Sepia Gallery
By Joel Simpson
In these large, predominantly dark gelatin silver prints Japanese photographer Akio Ohki (b. 1938) documents a politically oppressive, internationally isolated period in Taiwan"s history. The deep blackness of these images fills the frame like an atmosphere, even in images taken in broad daylight. The prints on the wall are, in fact, darker than the versions in the book of Ohki"s work, and the contrast in feeling tone is striking.
The photographs in the book are highly personal documentary images; the ones on the wall feel as though they are dredged up from memory: fragmentary, skewed, but bizarrely telling in their juxtapositions. Ohki has unleashed the deepest power of black and white to suggest mental imagery, subjects wrenched from their customary pan-sensual (color) contexts and re-presented, often grainy, distilled down to their emotional significance. Many of these pictures were shot from the hip, enabling Okhi to close in on his subjects unobtrusively. The resulting images frequently cut off part of a face, or even more frequently skew the horizon between 30 and 75 degrees. The chosen images, however, are the ones in which these aleatory factors have arrived at unexpected truths.
The very first image in the show places a teenage girl"s half face on the extreme right edge of the image, while at the center a man in a dark hat and suit caresses a goat. The picture is entitled The Day of a Festival, Puli, but the girl"s expression is more anxious than festive, and the faceless man seems to be representing some kind of power that values the goat over the girl, or alternatively expects the girl to behave as docilely as a goat.
The fourth photograph is an extreme close up of the face of a retired Japanese soldier who had held out for 29 years on an Indonesian island after the Second World War was over, then living among the Ami ethnic group on Taiwan. Only half of his face, bearing a constrained half-smile, is the least bit illuminated; the other half is in blackness, yet both catch-lights fix intently on the viewer. It is the face of a man who hid for decades as the world went by, peering out of his hiding place, yet on the bottom left of the frame, the wide open eye of a child glances right.
Many of these photographs reveal elemental means of sustenance that shock us in their crudeness and desperation. Out of the darkness of another image we see a tangle of snakes and possibly ropes ‹ for human consumption? ‹ while at the upper left is the gleam of a dark sweaty bare foot. In another, enlarged to 30x40 inches, a woman in a spiral print dress crouches by her yard geese, while her white dog on the left looks at the viewer. The right side of the print is framed b a black silhouette of trees; in the distance a white surface suggests water or a snow, or perhaps a field covered in plastic.
Ohki includes a number of street-based images, though they are nothing like the street photography of Western realists. In one of the most striking of these, a silhouetted woman shields herself from the sun in the lower left of the image with an umbrella, while a line and wall of blackness converge towards a vanishing point on the right. A small crowd, almost all wearing white shirts and dark pants, can be seen in the distance. Between the woman and the crowd, a semi-circle of concrete fragments, the deterioration of the walkway, spreads out over the line. Ohki has put together themes of isolation, conformity, infinite regress, and degradation accepted as normal, yet the title is Puli, the Day of the Festival. Festival? In one of the most poignant images in the show, Downtown Kaohsiung, a hatted man gives the camera a baleful look as he holds a fist up to one eye, as a seated young mother changes a baby on the far left; in between a standing two-year-old barefoot in shorts, and seeming to be missing his right arm, looks at the man. Some light enters from behind the mother and baby, spreading out on the irregular and fraying concrete pavement, but fades into darkness as it reaches the man, wrapped in black, with only the four fingers of his fist in highlight.
Almost every image squeezes unexpected truth out of dark juxtapositions. There are two pictures of storm-ravaged buildings, one of the Chihpen hot springs after a typhoon, with a dark-roofed house having fallen down a ravine and come to rest on a tilt; and a small theater in suburban Taichung being hit by what appear to be large hailstones, illuminated by outdoor floodlights, which we also see. In one huge enlargement, a lonely sentinel stands guard by a land bridge in suburban Hualien. He seems to be out in the middle of nowhere, but the state compels him to stand guard. This 30x40 inch photograph is one of the grainiest in the show, further stressing that we"re looking at mental images, at several removes from everyday reality.
Through 12/23/06.
E-Mail
This Article
Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005
The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum
By Ola Manana
Inscribed into the ivory handles of an early 17th century knife and fork set from Northern Italy; miniature pigs, horses, sheep and dogs scramble in a swirl of intricately carved activity. Presumably intended as an aid in the consumption of said farm animals, the image of them scrambling away from the tip of the fork and blade is one of the dark humor anecdotes tucked away in this surprisingly comprehensive exhibition, Feeding Desire.
Comprised of over five hundred pieces chosen from the museum"s permanent collection, the show offers a crash course in the implements of fine dining used throughout the past five centuries. More than a historical presentation, the curators open up a discussion about the culture of eating practices, particularly the rise of the concept of "fine dining " in the Western world.
The visitor is treated to the story of mama spoon and papa knife, and their wayward son, the fork, whose popularity among the English gentry eventually overshadowed its resemblance to the Devil"s pitchfork. These implements would establish a physical distance between food to be eaten and the mouth, a distance that by implication separates human nature from animal behavior.
Phrases such as "hand to mouth" still retain their negative connotation, because knowledge of the proper use of fine cutlery implies class distinction. A person who is truly hungry would not bother to mediate this distance between sustenance and gratification, feeding necessity, not desire.
The show focuses on this symbolic distance and the exquisite cutlery designs produced to bring sensuality and ritual to the dining experience.
A collection of CV Gilbert"s designs, from 1890, stand out for their naturalistic elements. A snake coils around the handle of a teaspoon. Chicken feet form the prongs on a set of tongs. A tiny monkey straddles the stem of a ladle whose cup is made to look like a spider"s web.
Many of the specialty items were created to accompany other inventions. For example, the "buttonhole napkin" introduced by Air France in 1976 presumes that you have a button, of course, so that you can easily secure the napkin (with its corner buttonhole) and "eat with confidence" during air turbulence.
If you happened to find yourself at sea on the SS United States in 1952, you may have noticed the homey stoneware; it was made heavy enough not to slide off the table if there"s a little wave, and its simple, functional design featured stylized stars that surrounded the rim of bowl and plate.
Or on the other hand, if you had the misfortune to be incarcerated in New Mexico in 1960, Armand Whitfield designed the perfect set of flatware for you. The knives were deranged, with holes punched into the red plastic blade to weaken its structure and render the utensil useless for a stabbing people, while the red color helped to alert prison guards to who"s holding a knife, just in case.
But what about chopsticks, you say? East does indeed meet West: A pair of silver chopsticks attributed to Tiffany"s from the early 20th Century, stands out as a perfect metaphor for desire. Sleek as twin hatpins, they connect with a thin silver chain. In the East, they are definitely functional; but in the hands of a bewildered Westerner, it"s all about beauty and desire.
Through 10/29.
E-Mail
This Article
Elizabeth Condon
Dorsch Gallery
By Rachel Hoffman
It is easy to be seduced by Condon"s paintings; otherworldly and dream-like, the structure of her work is rooted in natural forms that resonate with a summertime nostalgia for tropical environments. Her retro-psychedelic palette conjures up colors so palatable that they seem to have a taste. For example, in the painting, Monkey Painting, a flaccid "melting" monkey floats above a bed of lettuce, looking like a chocolate candy figurine that could have been inspired by an Alice in Wonderland character. Condon's expressive use of color hints at the tropical plants, birds of paradise and bougainvillaea of childhood bliss, enhanced by the kindness of memory. But there is also something musical, rhythmic in the way she combines florescent green with duller greens that shift towards blue or acid-yellows and then warm to a calm, muted violet. In the painting, Psychedelic World, colors splash and spark; embers in a gulf of darkness seem to have a physical presence. There is a burning glow between the borders of the color shifts in the rainbow pattern, and this vibrates against electrified green tropical foliage in the center of the painting.
Representational imagery mingles here with abstract forms; these paintings read like open narratives that rely heavily on intuition. Yuan Dynasty Chinese scrolls hugely influence her work. Condon is drawn to this particular genre because of the way in which different points of view are forged into one multi-layered and time-compressed experience. She builds puzzling and complex illusions of space, created with color and pattern. While many systems are at work in these paintings, clearly this artist"s first language is color.
10/14 through 11/11
|
