Every day I am astonished anew by the straightforward way
cats change direction and by how life continues on its way
while producing the most vivid images at the same time. On
walks through the city, a small video camera is an ideal notebook.
-Eric
Hattan
Liquid
Concrete features Swiss artist Eric Hattan in the main space,
with New York based photographer, Zoe Leonard in the lounge
and Belgian artist Michel François in the library.
An antidote for the over-saturated eye, Eric Hattan's videos
from his work Beton Liquide, or, LIQUID CONCRETE, enable
us to take a break between the rush and hurry of our visual
world. On fifteen monitors, placed around the gallery, Hattan
reveals his camera's observances. Short, quiet incidents are
caught on film and looped, very much like the blowing plastic
bag of American Beauty, but without the dramatization, without
the artist's addition of music, melancholy or nostalgia. The
works are like video ready-mades, the camera records minor
occurrences: a curtain blowing, a basketball thrown through
a hoop, water pouring out of a drain pipe, the changing light,
cast on a billboard on the side of a building.
The minor
occurrence is given a moment's importance, as with Zoe Leonard's
photographs, which depict the urban mystery of plastic bags,
caught and blowing on the branches of trees. Michel François'
project, Action/La Plante En Nous is comprised of a series
of spontaneous actions, or as he calls them, '120 moments
of irony and beauty.'
Taking
the incidental as subject matter, their works introduce a
new preoccupation at the SI: looking at what happens in the
time and space "between", so that this exhibition is portrayed
as a sort of intermission. This theme of intermission or entr'acte
will recur unexpectedly in the SI's programming this year,
challenging the accepted notion of an exhibition having defined
beginning and end points. The repetition and incidental beauty
of the works in liquid concrete will serve as a kind of trailer,
introducing the idea that exhibitions do not begin or end,
but rather flow and linger.
Special
thanks to Paula Cooper Gallery and Barbara Gladstone Gallery.
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