"Hearts of Palm".
Night Gallery (hours of operation: 10 PM to 2 AM) is an off-space in East Los Angeles nestled between a taqueria and a beauty salon. Opening last February under the direction of artist Davida Nemeroff, this intimate nocturnal venture appeared as a welcome other to the city's more pedestrian gallery scene. The venture's innocuous slackness--the artworks aren't exactly titled or untitled, the installations may change during the course of the show, the space is attended by whichever trusted friends happen to be hanging around on a given evening--only lends breathing room to the venue's black-walled cube.Night Gallery's recent exhibition "Hearts of Palm," featuring designer and artist Peter Harkawik with Wintergarten Ltd (a collaboration between LA-based artist Parker Davis and an anonymous partner), was an exemplary demonstration of this loose yet rigorous sensibility--a show in flux both conceptually and literally. For instance, in Harkawik's installation Flesh & Flash (retrofitted) (all works 2010)--a single photograph of the artist's hand gripping a bulbous daikon, the index finger mangled (having once been injured by a belt sander), appeared for weeks to be the work's only component. However, on the final night of the show, Harkawik, adding paint to the photo's surface, introduced a latticelike wooden construction to the wall and a chair to the space, thoughtfully positioned for ideal viewing. That Harkawik would have completed the piece sooner if not for an unforeseen emergency only reinforced the sense of trauma, tenderness, and urgency that the artists conjured through material form.
Elsewhere in the room, Wintergarten Ltd, already known for its published collections of found pictures, contributed two sculptural installations that were, not surprisingly, anchored by found content. For example, in Untitled, the collective adorned a large slab of funereal marble with an arrangement of suggestive figurative photos (two of which were stolen during the opening). And in Mike Wilson (Diary of a Deceased Amateur Photographer), two side-by-side slide projectors illuminated (nonsequential) images taken between 1975 and 1982 by a semihomeless wanderer named Mike Wilson, whose photos Davis rescued from the garbage after Wilson's demise. Mere the itinerant artist's circle of posthippie friends is shown from January to June amid various still lifes and close-ups of plants: men skinny-dipping by a lake, their tan lines testifying to their outdoor lifestyle; a melancholy sun-kissed blonde on the beach; a brunette, crouched in a thicket of bare branches, peeing; a harvest of mushrooms in open hands; an empty snowy field. Wilson appears too, as a transient poster boy for late-1970s drug culture, perched on a yellow Volkswagen, cupping a handful of marijuana. After cycling through this series, the projections plunge into a period of darkness punctuated only by the clicks of the slide carousel that cannot help but evoke, with haunting simplicity, a representation of mourning.
Such a predilection for the documentary, and an impulse to appropriate, channels the cultural malaise of our present-day economy. In "Hearts of Palm" materials were scrounged from flea markets and storage-unit auctions, possessions of the broke and deceased traded at bargain prices: a fluid market for the margins. And as Nemeroff and her tribe embrace the uncertainty of their undertaking while piecing together its parameters, Night Gallery appears to be a kind of acquiescent medium itself.
NIGHT GALLERY
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| Author: | Taft, Catherine |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Artforum International |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Nov 1, 2010 |
| Words: | 538 |
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