TODT at Synthetica | m | Gallery

Video by Dania Eliot

TODT at Synthetica | m | Gallery, 2157 Central Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45214.
Through May 29, 2010.

Country Club Performance Owes Much to the Art of Collaboration

To say that Roberto Lange is a man of many talents is an understatement. On a warm evening this past April, the Brooklyn-based perennial collaborator performed as part of the WE ALL OWE TOUR at Country Club Gallery. The last time Lange exhibited his expansive reserve of musical allusions in Cincinnati he collaborated with visual artist David Ellis on an installation at Publico Gallery in January of 2008. For that project, Lange orchestrated the rhythms & melodies for a moving phoenix made out of empty beer and liquor bottles—an account of beauty via repurposed cast offs. His current effort at Country Club felt similar in sentiment but disparate in location.

Performing under his pseudonyms Helado Negro & Epstein, Lange and his two tour mates, singer Julianna Barwick & visual artist Jonathan Dueck, created visual and aural stimuli that ran the gamut from glowing negative space, ambient-like pseudo-noise music, languid ethereal vocal layering, and soulful clap alongs. The artists’ purpose for touring was not to share canned creations with a passive audience, (as is often the case with many music or film performances) as much as they were looking to each other and their surroundings for inspiration.

The press release for their brief tour of seven cities in eight days states, “using the framework of a traditional music venue tour, these three artists will create a new body of work that will reflect their time together and those they encounter.” Indeed, one could witness traces of their Northeast trail ending in Ohio, in Dueck’s film images of freshly tilled cornfields, which appeared to be taped from the window of a moving vehicle. In fact, much of the artists’ works over the course of their 2+-hour performance reference movement through time and space.

Dueck’s 16mm films on which he painted, scratched, stamped, & projected might be the most literal allusion to motion, as the images are constantly moving vertically up the screen. Even in their abstract form, they have a kind of running across the ground, or looking down while bike riding feel to them. When paired with Lange’s improvisational chest-thumping tracks, the result is semi-hallucinogenic. Colors vibrate and reverse negative video of satellites and the moon’s surface seem to appear & disappear in relief.

Julianna Barwick’s voice was the main component of her songs, consisting of looped tracks of simple refrains, which she sings over. The New York Times called her “the New Enya” and the title seemed to fit. The juxtaposition of Barwick’s celestial sound with film scenes of water enhanced the ghostly quality of her work. The singer’s resulting songs would have been boring however, without the equally discordant notes she sang over her looped refrain. Similar to the contrast between her songs and Dueck’s simultaneously projected film images, the dissonant tones she sung reinforced the quality of her looped vocals.

The evening’s standout performance was clearly Lange, a veritable jack-of-all-trades who appeared equally comfortable singing a capella in Spanish, as he did strumming a guitar or mixing his unique brand of “experimental hip-hop influenced electronic music”. Clearly, this is a man who has rhythm pulsing through his veins and longs to share it with his audience. Collaborating with other artists has always allowed Lange various pathways to that goal. In between sets Lange was the most extroverted of the three participating artists, divulging the depth of his fondness for the other two participants and reiterating their desire to create a record of their time on tour together.

A small downside of the evening was the location of the artists’ performances, as an upscale furniture store seems far removed from the rebar-filled raw space where Lange performed only a few short years ago. Located on the second floor of Voltage’s contemporary furniture gallery—and in fact, sharing space with the retail store—paintings by Lange’s long collaborator David Ellis hung on the walls of faux living room & bedroom displays. The pristine white cube to the left of Country Club’s entrance where the artists performed felt like a far cry from where Lange presented previously—or even Country Club’s last incarnation next to Carl Solway Gallery—in Over-the-Rhine. If the ostensible purpose of this tour was for the artists to create work that would reflect their experiences, the encounters they had in Oakley would most certainly be dissimilar than those they might have had in previous locations. It will be interesting to see how their product turns out.

- Maria Seda-Reeder

The WE ALL OWE tour took place at Country Club on April 10, 2010, featuring performances by Helado Negro, Julianna Barwick & Epstein, with visual artist Jonathan Dueck. For more information, click here.
Country Club is located on 3209 Madison Road, Cincinnati, OH 45209. Te..513.792.9744. Hours: Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. and by appointment.
Photos: Courtesy of Joe Lamb.

Spangler's Cold Comfort at the Prairie

Phil Spangler’s Cold Comfort (2010) is as an ambitious exhibition. Presenting a collection of sculpture that encompasses the living to the kinetic, it addresses the tense relationship between man and the natural environment. This is conceptual territory that can easily diverge into the cliché; fortunately Spangler spares his audience the heavy-handed moralizing (he doesn’t even provide an artist’s statement) and allows the work to speak in its place.

An assortment of six sculptures, Cold Comfort is a study in both texture and contrast. The title piece, a cast bronze deer skull partially enveloped by Borax crystals, is at first glance redolent of Damien Hirst’s vulgar For the Love of God (2007). Spangler’s Cold Comfort, by contrast, is a tasteful, nuanced rumination on death and rebirth.

Three hung felt pieces entitled Yellow, White and Black, (2010) also smothered in Borax crystals, function in much the same way. The subtlety in these works though comes less from their conceptual ramifications than from their sly insinuation of deep space receding back from a dense, surface-reaffirming substance.

Everything I Thought I Knew, the most substantial and important of the works on display, is nothing less than an indictment of human misappropriation of the natural world. A kinetic sculpture that parades the object realism of a desiccated, desertified landscape before you, Everything I Thought I Knew (2010) requires the viewer to become participant. As the hand crank activates the sculpture, the slow, methodical churning of the mechanism dismembers the landscape before your eyes. That you as the operator are directly responsible for this destruction is immediately clear, what is less clear, and more compelling, is that on the other end of the sculpture you too are responsible for its recreation.

The structure is complex and formally alluring, but the manufacture seems out of place. The clean beams and fresh-from-the-hardware-store aesthetic are not in keeping with the roughly hewn quality we often associate with the natural environment.

Of all the works in Cold Comfort only Right Back Where We Started From (2010) fails to truly satisfy. This can be attributed to the fact that the technical requirements for keeping grass alive indoors must ultimately overwhelm the formal aspects of the sculpture. Though not without its own appeal, its interest exists primarily as novelty rather than as a work of art proper.

Instead of brow beating the viewer with messages of impending doom (as many shows on Earth themes do), Phil Spangler has chosen to construct a subtle narrative that suggests environmental destruction and renewal might be more closely bound than we often think. Spangler’s creations impart to us the notion that all things dead are reborn in new ways, and that no matter what the natural world will go on; perhaps just without us. Cold Comfort indeed.
- Alan Pocaro

Phil Spangler. 'Cold Comfort' at Prairie, 4035 Hamilton Avenue in Northside, Cincinnati, OH. Tel: 513.557.3819. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday 10-6 and Saturday 10-4. Through May 8, 2010.
Photo above: Spangler, Phil. Cold Comfort (2010). Bronze, borax. Photo courtesy of Prairie.
below: Spangler, Phil. Everything I Thought I Knew (2010). Mixed Media. Photo courtesy of Prairie.