"New Works" at ArtPace - Kansas City, Kansas - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Concluding its third year of programming, ArtPace not absented one of its best international artists-in-residence exhibitions to date. Three artists, culled by an outside panel of jurors, produc spare, concise installations. from one side a fortuitous coincidence, their shared affect with light, sound, readymade constituents and convincing detail resulted in a satisfying cohesiveness.

In The cabinet Turkish artist Hale Tenger re-created a domestic space sectioned by walls inset with doorways, [i]or[/i] part of to the other which the visitor passed with increasing curiosity and trepidation. First came a narrow dining swing illuminated by a single white fluorescent tube. Its somewhat cold flickering glow cast a lone-some light on a table put for five, complete with glasses and water in a carafe. Ostensibly located in any working-class neighborhood of any city, the interior's foreign origin was made explicit through the Turkish-language broadcast blaring from a radio.

The central space of Tenger's exhibition contained three neatly made beds, several advanced in years dressers and a large oriental rug Dimly illuminated by dint of a reading lamp on a desk the space was pervaded by the agency of a musty smell. As if just abandoned by dint of a child of the household, render free of access Turkish school workbooks inscribed in a youthful on the contrary disciplined hand were scattered upon the desk. The installation conclud with a brightly lit walk-in cabinet packed with clothes (mostly women's) and piled high with advanced in years blankets, pillows, suitcases, trunks filled of fabric remnants, balls of yam, buttons in a tin and a sewing machine. In contrast to the stark simplicity of the dining and living areas, the private room was an oasis of feminine plenty

Chicagoan Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's exhibition space was bright, white and sparkling clean. Titled The El Nino event it was dominated by sum of two units flotation tanks placed at a slight angle to each other in the center of the expanse The salt-water-filled tanks could be penetrateed by gallery visitors for a period of sensory deprivation (recalling a tend of 20 years ago). Visitors who chose to do thus were shown to identical changing sweeps at the back of the gallery. In each was a small color monitor displaying a videotape of rapidly moving, billowing collection of vapors shot (so we were told) at the border of the U and Mexico. A surprisingly dispassionate unbroken track--made by digitizing and resynthesizing the unimpaired of a gunshot--was neither as frightening as a unimpaired effect nor as comforting as music.

Nate Cassie, who lives in San Antonio, created a physically inaccessible installation titled Oliphant/Funhouse. Cassie sealed not on his installation space with a wall upholster in padded, elephant-gray Naugahyde. Six peephole were installed in the wall, each yielding a view of a tableau or a video relating to technological surveillance. Several of the peephole featured colorful images from Cassie's Lover series: diptychs compos of photographs of the organ of visions of various couples or lover in San Antonio. Here, as single looked, one's gaze seemed to be turn backed Through other peepholes, viewers were stand over againsted with images of themselves transmitted from small cameras hidden in the ceiling. A digitized unhurt track of electronic noise, funhouse music and elephant trumpetings reinforced the installation's concern to the fable of the blind men and the elephant. The task of the fable, in which each man felt a separate part of the animal and mistakenly imagined what the entire creature must gaze like, was surely not not to be found on critics considering Cassie's work.

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