B
lah concrete no longer dominates the Contemporary Arts Center lobby. But, ironically, a gray palette defines one of two new exhibits coinciding with the redesign of the 12-year-old space. The other exhibit uses bright light to conceal and reveal. Together, the three undertakings reflect the challenging, ongoing need to embrace the past, present and future all at once.
Daniel Arsham’s Remember the Future is anchored by a gray mountain of hundreds upon hundreds of pop culture artifacts cast from volcanic ash, obsidian, quartz and glacial rock. Yet colorful, not-so-distant memories stir as the viewer circles the heap and notices boom boxes, video game controllers, keyboards, cameras, turntables, guitars, film reels and videotapes. What should we think of the CAC’s decision to remember the past and include a pay phone on the refurbished Metrobot when there is one amid Arsham’s debris?
“We’re at a precipice regarding technology. All that’s in that pile, you can have now on your phone,” the Ohio-born, New York-based artist told a CAC audience at his artist’s talk on the show’s opening night. Arsham says his 2-year-old won’t recognize any of the objects when he reaches adulthood. Obsolescence is built into today’s products.
“Obsolete” is too strong a label for the CAC’s original lobby design. But a mere decade after its opening, the harsh environment needed a change. “We wanted the lobby to be the movie trailer for what’s upstairs,” says CAC curator Steven Matijcio.
Architect Zaha Hadid’s vision of an “urban carpet” that draws visitors from the sidewalk has been realized with a colorful mural blanketing the walls, lights on the concrete pillars and the welcome desk front and center. A neon sign over the entrance reads “Contagious,” reflecting the vibe enjoyed at the café and in conversations on comfortable couches. Even though they resemble thunderclouds, chandeliers by Cincinnati sculptor Matt Kotlarczyk perk up an overcast day. The CAC needed to seize control of space, time and light.
Light acts as what Matijcio calls a talisman in Albano Afonso: Self-Portrait as Light, the Brazilian artist’s first solo U.S. show. Flashes conceal the artist’s face in portraits he photographed while standing before a mirror. His hands appear to hold a mystical orb that both illuminates and obscures. Light is what creates a photograph and enables our eyes to see it. But expose a photo to light and over time it deteriorates until it looks like one of Afonso’s perforated self-portrait mash-ups with old masters.
These layered photographs, with Afonso’s eyes peering under images of Dürer, Rembrandt and others, intend to revere the artist’s predecessors rather than render them irrelevant. They’re akin to Kehinde Wiley’s oeuvre, seen last summer at the Taft Museum of Art and 21c Museum Hotel. White circles dance about the artists’ heads like stars. “He’s giving old masters new life,” Matijcio says. “They circulate in the present through the vehicle of light. He’s making a duet with what came before.”
Arsham also explores the idea of the past, present and future occupying a single space in what he calls “fictional archaeologies.” Nature and architecture compete and collaborate as Arsham builds “a perfect ruin.”
Arsham’s art is influenced by surviving Hurricane Andrew while growing up in Miami, though he’s reluctant to call it a defining moment. More significant may be a visit to Easter Island, where he saw the Moai statues next to archaeological tools left behind centuries later. “I began to think, ‘How can I collapse history a little bit?’ ” he told his CAC audience. Arsham admits to being a control freak in trying to manipulate time. Each pockmark on an object is carefully placed.
With a nod to the history of Easter Island, ancient Greek sculpture and the calcified bodies of Pompeii, Arsham has sat for hours covered in plaster to form full-body molds that are then covered with ages-old marble and black glass sourced from demolished buildings.
Hands raised and heads bowed, the figures appear disoriented and contemplative, as if they’re visitors from the past awakening in the present. Or perhaps they are comrades from today sent to a lonely future. A possible scenario plays out in the artist’s short film Future Relic 02, starring James Franco as an archivist.
Time slows down in this concise, sparse exhibit, inviting close examination. A study of the creases in the figures’ clothing suggests a watch, iPod or cellphone stuffed in a pocket. But which articles from Arsham’s time capsule are useful or even recognizable to these beings?
If Arsham’s gray world is a downer, there is playfulness in his all-white “snarkitecture.” A drop frozen in time sends an impossible ripple along a vertical surface. A cloaked invisible figure, both present and absent at the same time, is either emerging from or being swallowed into another gallery wall.
Walls figuratively have been torn down between the CAC and the adjacent 21c Museum Hotel in a first-time collaboration that is another smart rethinking of the use of space. The rest of Afonso’s exhibit, consisting chiefly of a series of landscape photos and a commissioned mural, begins in the CAC galleries, runs along the buildings’ Walnut Street façades and then continues inside the lobby of the 21c.
In another merger of nature and architecture, Afonso’s kaleidoscope treatment turns lush leaves of Brazilian rainforests into hard shapes reminiscent of Hadid’s building and the crowded cities where most of Brazil’s population actually lives.
Multiple incisions on the photographs direct the viewers’ eyes like shafts of light. Mirrored surfaces behind the punched-out photographs literally invite reflection about where we are now, where we were and where we appear to be headed.
And where are we, and the CAC, going? “Cincinnati Swing,” a series of pendulums tipped with white bulbs, scales the concrete back wall of the lobby up to the sixth floor. The arms tick, tock and whirr as seconds pass. The installation is a fitting complement to the Arsham and Afonso exhibits and sums up the spirit of the new lobby: After much darkness, embrace the light.
ALBANO AFONSO: SELF-PORTRAIT AS LIGHT and
DANIEL ARSHAM: REMEMBER THE FUTURE continue at the Contemporary Arts Center through Aug. 30. More info: contemporaryartscenter.org.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2015.