Min Jeong Seo: To Live On

Existential questions concerning the offset of death and the continuation of life abound in this installation by Korean artist Min Jeong Seo. Composed of the dried stalks of roses and medical infusion bags, Seo’s rose blooms are kept alive with the aid of the bags. As Seo states, the installation comments on the “progress of medicine and the prolongation of human life.”

However, with the aid of the infusion bags, the life sustained by the rose blooms here is essentially artificial and codependent. If Seo were to remove the bags the blooms would shrivel up the same way their stems have. This begs the question, in all our attempts to prolong our lives, has contemporary medicine succeeded in also increasing quality of life?

Suspended in time, the blooms invite us to observe conservation at work as the installation persuades us to confront our fears concerning sickness and death and our constant pursuit of youth. 

For more information on this installation, and other beautiful works by Min Jeong Seo, please visit her website here. 

- Victoria Nolte

Tobias Klein’s Virtual Sunset

The expansion of interconnectivity between people worldwide and its impact on artists and artists’ interaction with their audiences is a complex issue explored in the 2012 installation Virtual Sunset by Tobias Klein. The installation is composed of a large grid from which are suspended hundreds of tentacles of PVC tubing emitting a series of vivid colours from cadmium orange to lemon yellow to Cerulean blue. Viewers are encouraged to walk through the installation, a corporeal element juxtaposed with the otherwise visual connotations of the words ‘virtual’ and ‘sunset’; for the piece is a time-based compilation of photographs of sunsets taken by online participants and uploaded to the project’s website, which you can visit here.

The sunset is a natural occurrence common to the experience of every living being and yet can provoke powerful feelings in the beholder. Klein demonstrates the complexity of our growing dual-identity as natural beings and avatars, straddling the line between the realms of the material and immaterial. On the Tobias Klein Studio website, we are told that by uploading images of sunsets from across the world, we produce a “simulacra of a shared singular sunset”, a result which reflects the desire within online communities to produce a similarly shared (read common) yet personalized and ultimately paradoxical ‘universal’ experience.

Klein’s installation uses subject matter common to us all, yet provided through a medium which is as versatile as its goods are intangible. Interestingly, the problems surrounding artworks relying on viewer participation over the internet are articulated in the format of the installation, since there is a negative correlation between the viewers’ comprehension of the function or implications of the piece and his or her proximity to the actual physical object. In other words, by way of the Internet I can, from across the world, not only understand the artist’s intent and process, but also manipulate his artwork. On the other hand, if I was merely (and I use this term fully understanding the irony) to visit the piece on-site, I would be at a loss to recognize the object’s purpose.

There is, however, room for redemption; while the Internet-participator has the upper-hand in the sense of being more ‘informed’, the on-site viewer has the opportunity to interact with the work physically, becoming part of the virtual sunset in a corporeal way. Which experience can be said to be more ‘true’? How do we define shared experiences and how do we categorize levels of human interactivity? Can we? Whichever way you see it, Klein’s installation poses us these questions in a stirring and enticing manner. For more on Tobias Klein’s work, please visit the Studio website here.

-Stephanie Read

Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood

This work, by Nalini Malani, was one of the highlights of dOCUMENTA 13, held this past summer in Kassel, Germany. 

Influenced by personal and cultural experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India, Malani’s work focuses on gender and displacement and incorporates cultural imagery alongside new media, projection, and shadow play. 

In Search of Vanished Blood is a colossal installation that features projections of light through revolving acrylic cylinders. The cylinders feature painted imagery and, as they spin, the painted imagery moves across the wall and creates an interesting dynamic of shadow. The images used in this installation feature various representations of female characters from the Hindu religion alongside Western icons. The result is a breathtaking, multi-dimensional installation that comments on such social issues as gender, violence, and religious fundamentalism. 

To see the installation in action, check out this video here. 

For more information about Malani’s work, please visit her website. 

- Victoria Nolte 

Lisa Kellner

In this series Inner Urban Sanctum, one of Lisa Kellner’s Site Responsive pieces, the artist focuses on decay, erosion and disease. As Kellner describes the project,

“These works use the imagery of diseased cellular activity to directly respond to the space in which they are installed.  I hand form, paint and sew together thousands of organic, bulbous shapes out of silk organza creating a structure that operates both as environmental sculpture and a three dimensional painting in space.”

All her Site Responsive installations are temporary, and once the installation finishes the parts are separated once more and used for the next installation. In this way, Kellner’s works are constantly being repurposed. To see more of her Site Responsive works, click here.  

- Lee Jones

David Altmejd

David Altmejd focuses on the growth that can occur in decay. The Montreal native makes artworks where colours, crystals, faux flowers and apparent signs of optimism arise out of the dead or dying. There is also an element of fantasy in his works as the dead come back to life, or become mythic creatures such as werewolves and giants. His artworks create an immense presence in their environments and viewers tend to feel like they have stepped into another world. To see Altmejd’s works is to be enveloped in awe. To see more of his works, click here.

- Lee Jones 

Random International’s Rain Room

Have you ever wished you could control the weather? 

Random International, a multimedia artist collective studio in London, is known for their sensational participatory works. As in many of their past projects,Rain Room relies on audience participation and serves as a platform to explore and research the behaviours of its viewers. 

In this ambitious project, installed now at the Barbican Centre in London, viewers progress through a one hundred square metre of falling water, and in the process attempt to avoid being drenched. The project is a meticulously choreographed downpour that responds to the movements of the viewer, making it entirely possible to control the rain. 

Rain Room therefore not only encourages its audience to become participants, but also invites them to contemplate how technology alters our environment, ultimately questioning the role humans play in its alteration. It provides an instance where the forces beyond human control (i.e.: the weather) are manipulated by human activity.

For more information about Rain Room and Random International, please visit the Barbican Centre’s website. 

- Victoria Nolte

Lydia Dekker

In her installation works, Lydia Dekker, an artist from the Netherlands, makes imaginary plant/animal/human hybrids. Her figures are a little bit scary, but cute at the same time, or as she describes them “Horrible Sweet”.  For more of Dekker’s work, click here. 

- Lee Jones

Mungo Thomson

In this series, Negative Spaces, Mungo Thomson covered the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles with images of the night sky. Thomson made this series  by inverting the colours of copyright-free starscape shots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. As the artist has described the murals, they are “like visual whale song—atmospherics for the spiritually inclined. Wallpaper for Esalen. California all the way.” There’s no doubt about it, these works create wonder. For more of Thomson’s work, click here. 

- Lee Jones