If you’re heading to New York before the end of June, do check out Paul Chan’s installation The Seven Lights. It’s by far the winner between the Tomma Abts/Double Album/Paul Chan shows at the New Museum.

The New Museum is an art installation space devoted to showing contemporary artworks only (I think from only within the past ten years). They are a non-collecting museum and moved recently from their tiny Chelsea location to their breathable, architecturally interesting site near Chinatown on Bowery.

I was particularly excited to see Paul Chan’s work — I’ve been a fan since he came to Carnegie Mellon in 2005 to present his work related to the Carnegie International 2004/05. The Charles Darger inspired content from his previous video of that period was a very righteous mash-up of the Vivian Girls and Microsoft Windows’ “drag a folder” icon imagery (and other obvious pixelated renderings in Flash of pop culture icons like Biggie Smalls and vultures).

His “subtle” work from the 2006 Whitney Biennial was underwhelming. But at the New Museum, he seems to have crafted projections that take the best of his narrative and figurative impulses and combined them with subtle colors, shapes, and refreshing use of the projector light-cum-object. My favorite were installations that turned the projector on its side, or obscured its lens borders to create a ghetto vignette around the typical 3:2 frame, or even the one (pictured above, with still life), that used a very small clip-on fan to flutter the homemade lens hood so that the image seemed to vibrate, like an “old timey” film.

Content-wise, the images showed objects floating through the air, dislodged from their grounding. Most images were merely shadows, ghosts, or voids of shape that seemed subject to a constant whirlwind (a tornado or other natural disaster, or civil upheaval. . .the metaphorical associations are primed, given Chan’s consistent interaction with politics around the globe). Viewers walked in circles around the museum floor, which had been divided into rooms. The stuff of the installation was minimal, and viewers were sometimes forced to walk in front of the projected image to move about the room.

Bravo.

Written by lauren - Contact