More Fun At Mass MoCA: Simon Starling, The Nanjing Particles
Simon Starling: The Nanjing Particles
Dec 13, 2008–Oct 31, 2009
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more photos in the exhibit album on photobucket
I don’t want to mislead you. Last weekend’s visit to Mass MoCA was not all about LeWitt, although LeWitt is certainly enough of a reason to make the trip. The museum’s vast gallery space is always home to a number of worthy exhibits. The museum complex is permanent host to Christina Kubisch’s Clocktower Project, Natalie Jeremijenko’s Tree Logic, Don Gummer’s Primary Separation and Bruce Odland & Sam Auinger’s Harmonic Bridge. The Kiefer show will be up through October. Even if there hadn’t been anything new, I’d have gone just to see Kiefer again. And the focus of this post, Simon Starling’s The Nanjing Particles is a wonderfully thoughtful, delightfully designed site specific installation that references the history and transformation of the Mass MoCA space from industrial complex to contemporary art museum.
Very briefly because I’m exhausted:
In the 1870s, North Adams’ Sampson Shoe Company, located on what is now the Mass MoCA complex, brought immigrant shoemakers from China to replace striking workers. The main part of Starling’s installation uses two 1875 stereoscopic photographs of these workers lined up outside the factory as a sort of beginning point. The photos are reproduced onto an enormous wall which greets the viewer upon entering the space. Behind the wall are two highly reflective steel sculptures whose amorphous forms are based on minute silver particles mined from the emulsion of the original photographs. The magnified “silver particles” were fabricated by workers in Nanjing, China.
The show is visually stunning, a brilliant use of the space, worth a trip! Photos ARE allowed which is exciting as the steel sculptures are an endless source for amusing photographs. Aside from being particularly photogenic forms, their highly polished surfaces reflect the surroundings in fabulous distortion much like carnival fun house mirrors.
The Nanjing Particles is on view through October 31, 2009.
You can read more in depth about the artist and the exhibit on the Mass MoCA site.
-Steph Gerolimatos
February 28, 2009 at 12:31 pm
I live in the wrong part of the country!
Heh! I guess I should count my blessings though. There’s an entire wing going up in Denver besides the DAM to house a bunch of Clifford Still’s paintings. I ought to put on my best behaviour and guest write about it for D’arteboard. I usually bypass Denver going to Loveland for sculpture supplies. (It’s just I tried living there for about seven months. Denver is a lot like Camelot. Tis a silly place…with drinks and jokes and Spam-a-lot.)
That picture of a side-burned Neanderthal is priceless!
March 2, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Andrew,
Clyfford Still. Yes!
the neanderthal himself is priceless, too!
March 1, 2009 at 1:36 pm
thanks, andrew, that neanderthal is me! it was really a fun show, but even so, once you started making some connections between the way the peices distort your image, and, say, the way history distorts actual events, and the old timey photography distorts the image of the past, (for example) you really start to see how well thought out and un-frivolous this work is. really amazing on so many levels.
we were disappointed that the harmonic bridge peice either wasn’t functioning, or just falls short. i love the concept, in fact, i like almost any sound installation-type work, being a musician and recordist of sorts. i have always wanted to incorporate sound into my work, or rather, create sound installations. we did one in college that turned an entire gallery into a big stringed instrument using moveable walls and steel cables. anyway the bridge peice at MASS MoCA–i hope its just a matter of a winter shutdown or something–i’d really like to get some recordings.
March 1, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I heard somewhere Tom Waits used a dumpster for a drum. I’d like to see him take that on tour though. I recently made a kalimba after years of wanting to. Just used a chuck of maple, electrician’s fish tape, and a terminal strip from an old main panel that I found at a scrapyard. Takes an hour to tune it though.
I got the whole distortion thing. I wonder what stuff would look like 100 years from now. We used to “insource” cheap labor, and now we “outsource” it. In! Out! Make up your mind, America! Might look like a scene from some cheesy Sylvester Stallone cop movie where sex is obsolete, and therefore elevated upon a sort of nostalgia, the sensations of which have to be artificially recreated.
I stopped watching TV a while back but someone told me there’s an animated series about a dude from nowadays who’s frozen and thawed out four centuries in the future. They’ll never stop mining that genre…as long as the future ain’t what it used to be. Yeah, I get it. I wish a lot more people did because history, the worse parts of it, keep repeating.
March 2, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Thanks for this post. I haven’t been to MassMoca in several years. The space is amazing. This looks like a wonderful exhibit. Perhaps we’ll make it to that part of the country before the exhibit is over.
March 2, 2009 at 8:47 pm
your welcome mim. thanks for reading. Mass MoCA’s currently chock full o’good stuff! i ate my fill and was sated for days!
February 6, 2010 at 4:33 am
Great site! Keep it up!
February 6, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Thanks!