~BLINN & LAMBERT . . ‘STRANGE LOOPS’
BY THE LIGHT – OF THE MOON
‘STRANGE LOOPS’ . . A GROUP SHOW
CURATED BY JOHANNES DeYOUNG & FEDERICO SOLMI
ARTSPACE, NEW HAVEN – UP THRU . . . FEB 29, 2020
see: ‘STRANGE LOOPS’ / ARTSPACE, NEW HAVEN
a strange glow . . . embraces the viewer,
as the doors of perception & romance, tumble & turn – at play.
a once rigid grid . . .
softly billows and folds.
plaid with . . . gentle / spatial disobedience.
This show, which speaks to future ‘systems’, both technical & societal / somehow, manages in a very wondrous way,
to keep human desire . . still, very much in the ‘loop’.
BLINN & LAMBERT, ‘Romantic Love’, 2018
35mm slide projection on 2 projectors, with custom benches, and plinth
23 minute loop
144 x 96 in.
what a beautiful title, for a profoundly spatial, and conceptional piece.
“REALITY isn’t what it used to be.”
so begins the curatorial essay.
“The title of our exhibition, ‘Strange Loops’, takes it’s name from DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER’S seminal text,
‘I am a Strange Loop’, a book that explores self-referential systems as paradigms for better understanding human cognition and the emergence of ego.”
“As artists working within the trappings of Twenty First Century media culture, we share interest and concern in the social and psychological effects of media culture at large, so the paradigm of the self-referential loop feels like an especially relevant point of departure.”
~Johannes DeYoung
indeed, the curators’ . . mission statement gives new meaning to the ‘intertwining’ of many different threads of thought / well . . it is a complex world, we live in.
long live poetry, and long live science.
Blinn & Lambert’s gently projected meandering plaid . . .
a nice enough metaphor for Romantic Love, as it is for abstracted reality, is also very much a metaphor for this exhibit’s dreamy, yet quite serious – meandering scientific curatorial essay, which begins with a time/place marker, the summer of 2019, and the many . . “semi-centennial celebrations of the Apollo 11 moon landing” / then proceeds to touch-tag this human, scientific achievement as ripe with justifiably implicit “human desire”, and continues onto . . musing about: “generations of poetic expression projected at the moon”, and yet, somehow also manages to touch base with that other colder, darker, indeed bleaker and very much moody side of the moon: “it’s metaphors for human aspiration, melancholy, and desire remain as relevant today as in the 18th & 19th centuries. Now more than ever we find heightened resonance for lunar poetics, especially when expressed in contrast to the calculated attention economies where desires . . never cease.”
~Johannes DeYoung
ah, the moon.
the cat and the spoon – played by the light of the moon.
upon which, held up like a mirror, the white-face painted Edo geisha, caught her ghostly reflection.
btw:
tomorrow Jan 10, 2020 is the Lunar Eclipse Full Moon, the blood moon. so, you know . . .
it’s nice when hard-minded art essays – collide with reality,
and still, something remains mysterious,
and vastly, poetic.
yes, the blown-apart perception of the ‘plaid’ grid, does holds close & dear – to the curators’ thesis.
yes, it is a very strange loop / who cares if it was once a shirt.
technology and poetry – are bedfellows / you can explain it away, or just let the dance begin.
it’s very telling, that the curators quote EMILE DURKHEIM:
“Irrespective of any external regulatory force,
our capacity for feeling is in itself an
insatiable and bottomless abyss.”
and go on to say, “perhaps this theme crystalizes in the work of BLINN & LAMBERT, whose digital slit-scan photography of a disembodied shirt folding and unfolding renders itself dislocated from quotidian meaning.”
or, as we like to say, bathed . . in the light of the moon.
KYLE WILLIAMS & NICHOLAS STEINDORF . . . aka BLINN & LAMBERT
but, we will give JOHANNES DeYOUNG, the last word:
“Our (moon-landing technological) tools are no longer perceived as mere voyage-enabling instruments, but rather as psychic extensions of the intrepid travelers themselves — black mirrors for self-reflection.”
PHOTOS: FROM THE OPENING DEC 14, 2019 / NANCY SMITH