Why appropriation? Joe Fig extends his exploration of the practice into and out of the realm of novelty. Here, he delves into the experience of the landscape of an artwork—its dimensions, positions, neighbors, and responses to light and to us, its inhabitants.
Balancing Act challenges viewers’ levels of participation, visual perception, and manual precision—a considerable number of actions needing to take place in a gallery setting, let alone anywhere outside of an arcade hall. While the artists’ collection of mechanically sharp paintings eviscerates any indication of their painterly hands, their huge interactive game contrastingly engages its participants to become their own blatant sculptor.
At Cristin Tierney, two of peter campus’s darkly introspective Polaroid portraits from the 1970s, installed in the office, remind us of the brooding romanticism of his early black-and-white landscape photographs. In an interview, campus calls landscape “a face inside out,” emphasizing his emotional projection into the scenes he records.
Unlike films, these works do not have any narrative, peak, or climax. Instead, they force viewers to take notice of the small, minute shifts of the quotidian life in these untouched natural zones and ecosystems.
For his recent show at the Cristin Tierney Gallery, Victor Burgin installed a single work, Photopath (1967–69). Last seen in New York in the 1971 Guggenheim International, this pioneering site-specific photographic installation returned, like a brilliant comet from a distant galaxy.