New pieces exhibited at MCASD’s Jacobs Building starting January 23rd, 2011.

 

Digital still taken from MCASD.org. Used for educational purposes only.

n “Madame Curie,” Jennifer Steinkamp finds and beautifully amplifies the consonance between two of Marie Curie’s great passions—gardening and physics—in her eponymous immersive video installation experience. Twigs, branches, stems, stalks, and blossoms—of plants selected from Edie Curie’s horticultural writings in her biography of her mother, Marie—gyrate, bunching together and pulling apart, in a convincing fibrous ebb.

The nuances of Steinkamp’s sophisticated algorithm believably evoke the restrained, tentative tug of scapes and internodes grappling as they swish in wind. I followed a single stem across the screen to see where the loop restarts, but I was surprised at the excellence of the video’s loop. The masses of flowers ramble realistically and beautifully, yet after awhile one wonders: Are they being blown about, or kneaded by invisible hands, or are they growing?--Germinating in seed like a botanical homunculus, waiting to emerge?

Walking into the dark room, with its three large panels, and the projection’s varying scale The installation warps the room’s interior by pushing at the visual plane. Plants mound up and bulge from the wall, then contract and make small black clearings that drop the wall away, playing optically with the spatial boundaries of the room. It is a serene, meditative space, that evokes the stimulating peace Curie may have found spending countless hours nurturing growth and cultivating beauty.

Madame Curie’s two Noble Prizes and her longtime work developing theory of radioactivity, hardly needs immortalization. But Steinkamp’s tribute to Curie’s love of gardening is a commemoration of the powerful versatility of creativity.

oan Jonas’  “The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things” is an exploration of the Southwestern United States delves crudely into themes of cultural proximity and juxtaposition, parallelism, cross-exposure versus contamination. The folksy effect of the exhibition at times seems to ponder, what is the most direct way between a concept and its execution. Jonas desires to landscape an idea, letting disparate propositions take root and harmonize with the geography, in a similar fashion to the random settlements and their sprawl across the Southwest. The video/sound installation tucked around the corner of the exhibition space reveals the process of artistic creation, the video contextualizes the exhibition as a gallery of processes and visceral interpretation, asking the question: Can the rough but indulgent delivery easily elicit a cerebral response? The accomplished Joan Jonas, a noted performer, and a pioneer in video art, has a lovely, direct manner of doing things, reflected in this exhibition in which, much like her performances, the gratification being aspired for appears to be the immediate. Beyond "Can Do," it is a "Just Do It" attitude.

Raul Cordero’s exquisite linen oils, that together have been presented as the sliding-puzzle-esque “Hendrickje,” blending text and flourishes of polyester resin that either marry or marr the images are well done, striking, and polished. The collages explore the effect of additions to an image. Do they lose context by being pastiches? Is the deconstruction of Rembrandts’ “A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?),” which is the foundation for the work, anarchic? Does it have meaning beyond its own existence and aesthetic dynamism? It’s thrilling work.

I must give special recognition to a piece that references Filipino culture. Rita McBride’s 1990 sculpture “Toyota” returns to view at MCASD. The material and motif of rattan furniture, very popular throughout the Philippines, is exclusively used to construct the body of a Toyota. Although the actual car came first, the Toyota sculpture is so expertly crafted that it can be seen as a precursor to the eventual mechanical copy. The sculpture, and its technological counterpart, can be together be viewed as a triumph of Asian design and precision. It reveals the ingenuity and engineering prowess that is as much instinctive in a country still considered by the world to be developing as it is in a neighboring country much considered to have arrived.

Finally, in Matt Mullican’s “Untitled (Cosmology, History, Language, Arts” oil rubbings of contemporary glyphs suggests that science can appear essentially mystical. The artistic depiction of icons in this piece, in its print-block esque bleeds and muddling, strips the context of our daily symbols and what is left behind seems arcane and mysterious.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego // Jennifer Steinkamp // Joan Jonas // Raul Cordero