Los Angeles – Invisibility: Powers & Perils On Oxy Arts at Occidental College, the consequences of that which cannot be seen. Curator Yael Lipschutz brings in an eclectic range of artists in this study: a first edition of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible man (1952) and a two -channel video projection by Sondra Perry who take into account the role of invisibility on black identity; a cluster of work on technology, including coding, data and deepfakes; And tailored scents by Katie Paterson and Taxidermied bird specimens that confront the imminent future of invisibility through extinction in the natural world.
Although each of these works is strong, as a collection, ping-pongs from one theme to another, the breaking of a coherent message. Based on the layout of the gallery, for example, is the first work that a visitor will probably encounter is, Invisible manit is protected in a display case and is mounted above a vintage spread of To live Magazine that combines promotion of the book with spooky portraits and assemblies of the famous photographer Gordon Parks. This suggests that the show could center blackness. Nevertheless, the rest of the artworks in this first part turns to topics that are so diverse as radiation, black holes, data and artificial intelligence, which none of them are made by black artists.
The work of the two black artists in the 13-person show is housed in the larger part of the gallery. Tavares Strachan’s “The Encyclopedia of Invisibility” (2018), a 2400 -page book dedicated to immaterial sensations and over the head seen histories, shows the submission for Palestine moving and because the book is protected behind glass, nobody can exist Erase. Behind the book, in his own corner, Sondra Perry’s “Double Four-time Negative Encetera I & II” of Sondra Perry, a video installation with two channels in which two dancers clap around, an AI-driven tool that makes them a rapidly changing patchwork of drywall. She all identifies them as black, is their hair texture and the incidental blurred forehead, a rare copy in which large technology is used to protect instead of exploiting.
Another fascinating two -channel video that AI uses is a fragment from “Soft Evidence” (2021) of the Art Collective Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), which shows the same woman in different institutions. In one channel she reads a newspaper in a creepy DryCleaning store. In the other, the woman stays empty to the screen. “I am not,” she says in a monotone, apparently referring to the fact that she does not really exist: the entire film is quite convincingly deep.
Although such criticisms of technology dominate much of this exhibition, because it is part of the Getty PST: Art and Science Collide Initiative, some works confront the climate crisis. In “To Burn, Forest, Fire” (2021), consisting of two custom -made incense sticks, one made with traces of LIDWort, Quartz Sandstone and Ferns, Paterson draws attention to endangered ecosystems by the scents of the Cairo forest, to imagine the world, the world that the world has First Forest, now a collection of 385 million -year -old fossils in Hudson Valley in New York. The other stick smells like the moss and endangered Amazon regwoud and warns us that it will soon be the same fate as its predecessor.
Invisibility Feels like a brainstorming session, with junctions that sprout from a central theme. But I wanted to see a thousand more thought bubbles in the form of works of art that had been tackled on every concept to work it out more fully. This show raises exciting questions about racial, technological and ecological invisibility and leaves us for more questions.
Invisibility: Powers & PerilsPart of Getty’s PST Art: Art & Science Collide Initiative, takes place to Oxy Arts to Occidental College (4757 York Boulevard, Los Angeles) until 22 February. The exhibition was compiled by Yael Lipschutz.
