dominique blais

Bernhard Günter “Un peu de neige salie (Untitled I/92) 9'00 (1993)”, 2009
Powdered charcoal on paper, 31 x 42 1/2"

Dominique Blais's exhibition...hinges on oppositions and dualities. Eleven works play on the contrasts between sight and sound, resemblance and difference, intangibility and materiality, and question the process and limits of perception. The pieces near the entrance of the gallery are auditory or visual conundrums...

The most outstanding pieces here, however, are those that explore the interplay between the senses, generating interstitial sensory states and an almost palpable sense of the unreal. In the tenuous and insubstantial Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, 2009, a video of a performance by a percussionist is projected onto a wall in broad daylight, while two speakers muffle the sounds instead of amplifying them. Viewers must reconstruct the performance by associating the barely perceptible sounds with the ghostlike flickers on the wall. The complementarity of sight and sound is also addressed in the charcoal drawing Bernhard Günter “Un peu de neige salie (Untitled 1/92)” 9'00 (1993), 2009, which is Blais’s visual equivalent to the nine-minute-long musical composition of the same name. Here, charcoal dust deposited by Blais on the loudspeakers was projected onto paper throughout the duration of the piece by the sound vibrations. The faint, blurred traces on the drawing materialize the passage of time. The tenuous materiality of sound is even more apparent in Distorsions Spectrales, 2008, in which a Plexiglas disc coated with ferrofluid turns silently on a turntable outfitted with magnets. Peaks and undulations form on the disc’s surface when it passes over the magnets, creating a tangible and ever-changing visual image of sound.

Rahma Khazam
Artforum.com

erika iris simmons aka iri5

Bob Dylan

Jimi Hendrix

Jim Morrison

iRI5 creates portraits of music legends made from recycled cassette tape. As she states "The idea comes from a philosopher's (Ryle) description of how your spirit lives in your body. I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging."

ron mueck

The following video was filmed during Ron Mueck's residency at The National Gallery, London. The exhibition Ron Mueck is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, November 3, 2006 - February 4, 2007. Video courtesy of The National Gallery, London.

simon schubert

The main installation of “In Apnoesie,” Simon Schubert's first solo exhibition in Berlin, collects crisp, clean black-and-white sculptures that recall horror-film tropes. At first glance, its cool presentation suggests that our nightmares have become domesticated, maybe even sanitized. But somehow, they still do not feel safe. The distance that Schubert achieves by removing any hint of gore and by addressing his darkly surreal source material with a levelheaded aesthetic slowly accentuates the creepiness of his work, even for viewers jaded by graphic violence.

...The show’s most impressive images are almost invisible at first. Lining the walls and ceiling are stark white panels of paper, which Schubert has folded and layered over other white sheets to evoke subtle sculptural images of classic wall moldings, long corridors, staircases, and halls with mirrors, like a stately, but probably haunted, house.

Ana Finel Honigman
Artforum.com