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Lawrence Weiner, At a Distance to the Foreground (1999). All images Nicolas Linnert for Art Observed.
Closing this week is Paula Cooper Gallery’s group exhibition Locations, a showcase of work by fifteen artists involving mapping and locality. At a moment when art and its surrounding socioeconomic structure have moved steadily to occupy a global, deterritorialized sphere, this arrangement of works is distinctive in its look back to a mid-century Modernist practice regarding spatial surroundings.
Installation view at Paula Cooper Gallery.
More text and images after the jump…
John Baldessari, California Map Project Part 1: California (1969).
Ranging from established artists to those of the most recent generation, Locations examines the political, aesthetic, conceptual, or documentary ways that geographic locale is presented in one’s work. An example is John Baldessari’s California Map Project Part 1: California, a photoseries with the intent to capture naturally occurring letters that together spell the state name. Key to the project was documenting exactly where in the Golden State these coincidental letters were found. In contrast to this necessarily local project is Sam Durant’s more recent Proposal for America in Mandarin, in which the artist turned upside-down two maps of the North and South Americas and while reconfiguring the shapes of the two continents, added Chinese text over the maps.
Sam Durant, Proposal for America in Mandarin (2011).
Catherine Opie, Edge of Time (#1-#9) (2007).
Catherine Opie’s Edge of Time photoset presents a locale that is both sublime and vast while staying intimate. The images of Glacier Bay show a panorama that is composed by nine individual frames—allowing for a broad, sweeping view that also forces the viewer to take in compartmentalized visual details. In a similarly intimate but altogether more political dimension, works by Francis Alÿs present painterly images of Jenin, one of the largest cities in Palestine. The soft color palette and gentle composition contrast with the depictions of worn barricades and armed guards.
Included in Locations is work by Francis Alÿs, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Stanley Brouwn, Sam Durant, Charles Gaines, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, Candy Jernigan, Sol Lewitt, Catherine Opie, Walid Raad, Mungo Thomson, and Lawrence Weiner. The exhibition ends June 11.
-N. Linnert
Related Links:
Locations – Paula Cooper Gallery [Main Page]
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