New Viewings #13

Our Life Mirrored by Two Suns: Kepler 16b, 2019, is a large a panoramic tapestry in the form of a three-metre-high enveloping circle depicting an imagined version of the planet Kepler 16b. This planet, discovered by SETI scientist Laurance Doyle as part of the Kepler Mission in 2011, was the first circumbinary example to be discovered – it orbits two suns of differing scales. Tatooine, the fictitious home of Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker’s home planet was the only previous example, which Doyle named his discovery having gained director George Lucas’s permission.

Bolster’s woven textiles are made from a composite of digital filmed stills that become changed through the introduction of the analog technologies of warp and weft. He proposes a world curiously close to our own reality kept distant only by glitches, approximations and interpretation. He is fascinated by the premise that we on Earth are being listened to, just as we are attempting to listen to and comprehend others across the gulf that is the visible and invisible universe of space.

Exploring the philosophical implications for historic forms of belief and superstition in an age of science and future space travel, and following the recent anniversary of the first moon landing, Bolster questions what that “giant leap for mankind” could mean, in a series of works which function as propositions for museums on the Moon whose collections display different cultural artifacts from earth.

Here in Barbara Thumm’s Berlin Gallery reproduced works by Jeff Koons, Cy Twombly, Gerhard Richter and the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau appear to have been applied to the floors of the space ahead of the artists’ intervention with a industrial quantities of cleaning fluids, each sweep of the mop leaving its mark as the now freed pigments leave traces and create new histories.

Fadell’s work raises questions of value in terms of damage as an aesthetic, an approach whose echoes can be found in his home city of Detroit, where urban decay appears to many outsiders as an exotic form of enticement.

Here, Thurber has created an environment that reflects her interest in the landscape as both an extension of the home and as another kind of interior-inside and out being symbiotically connected.

Speaking of this body of work, collectively titled Phantom Limb, she said: ”To be surrounded by a person’s possessions and immersed in the texture of the landscape and the buildings in which they lived, to see the light and the weather they saw from the places they inhabited, is to know that person in a particularly powerful way. Emerging from this intimate connection has been my continuing interest in the interactions of human presence, landscape and architecture.”

Shellburne Thurber studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at the start of the 1970s where her contemporaries include David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Nan Goldin. Their extended circle included other Boston based artists (including Mark Morrisroe and Jack Pierson) a grouping that has become known as the ‘Boston School’, and is recognized for the way in which it brought a new intimacy and informality to the language of documentary photography.

Thorpe’s art practice is a love affair with labor and craft, distancing itself through an act of adoration from the alienating characteristics of modernity and the ways of being of the modern man. Inspired in part by the art critic John Ruskin and the late socialist writing of William Morris, he applies an aesthetic of organic ornaments and botanical motifs that act as a veil and as a protective skin to enclose and hide an increasingly vital yet marginalized philosophy. These images originally produced as frescos, a technique resulting in brilliant and vibrant colors, speak to a forgotten past as their titles stridently declare a present and pressing intent. Through such a gesture, Thorpe advocates an opposition towards an economic and a social order closely connected with the modern and consequently the contemporary world we are immersed in today.