Sunkist
Works by Becky Kolsrud,William Kaminski, David Zuttermeister, and Marina Pinsky
Opening Friday November 11th, 7 - 10pm
November 12th - December 10th, 2011.
(Saturdays 2 - 6 and by appointment)
Cleopatra's Berlin
Kluckstraße 31, Berlin, Germany
This exhibition brings together the works of four artists using notions of externality,and temporal dimensionality, and the body or bodily as common points of reference. Portraits, styles, object forms, and cinematic tropes are cited, layered, or re-configured in ways that beckon towards the beneath or beyond.Rebecca Kolsrud re-presents moments of self-conscious display, drawing from the pages of a 1969 college yearbook as source material, in her untitled oil pastel series (all 2011). In these images of individual women, bodies hide behind clothes and faces harden into masks. Frozen smiles turn into inscrutable grimaces, a motif that recurs in her painting Kraft America’s Junior Miss Pageant (2011). Ultimately it is the women’s attire, set against dark voids—of blacked-out backgrounds, of disappearing bodies—that is most apparent, the outer layers of clothing the most colorfully expressive and most sincerely depicted.
In Marina Pinsky’s untitled photographs (all 2011), we see sculptural collages made from architectonic modules and architectural signifiers, interspersed with fleshy bodies or ephemeral mounds. Decorative patterns and cut-out illustrations of buildings sit on top of and underneath bricks, boxes, and cubes, whose forms contrast sharply with clumps of shapely fruits or soluble crystals. Punctuated by punchy colors and clips of vernacular pictorial idioms, these physical set-ups are then flattened and packaged into the two-dimensional representational space of the photograph.
In David Zuttermeister’s sculpture, Rising Falling (2011), three forms gently rest on top of each other: a tent lies on one end of a U-shaped tube, which is held up by two three-legged bases. A form that harkens back to Franz Anton Mesmer’s pseudo-scientific baquet, the tent also recalls the fashionable panniers of the aristocratic women in Paris (including Marie Antoinette) who would crowd around the baquet to be titillated byits “healing” electrical current. One end of the tube penetrates into the skirt of the tent as the other end phallically rises up into the open air. The erotic subtext of the baquet’s history rises to the surface but is sublimated, opaquely addressed but everywhere present.
William Kaminski’s video Car Chase (2011) features a chase, literally and metaphorically. An androgynous protagonist frantically drives through the streets and highways of Los Angeles, the sunny city of dreams, as if being followed. The cheap, gritty surveillance views of the cameras convey the reality of the footage, which is contradicted yet enhanced by the high flowing melodrama of the protagonist’s performance. Like the indeterminacy of the protagonist’s identity, it remains unclear who is chasing the protagonist and for what reason. The protagonist chases after itself as the narrative folds into a loop, a headlong plunge into an endless surface. Sunkist is the first exhibition in Europe for all four artists.
Text by Kavior Moon
