This week’s Weekly has my review of the SP Weather Station Weather Reports. Below is the copy with some pictures.
If there is angst or hysteria about global warming in the group show “Weather Reports” it is hidden. Instead of melting ice caps and imperiled polar bears, the quiet, small works show of drawings, prints and video at AHN/VHS focuses on the daily weather data recorded at the artist-run SP Weather Station on a rooftop in Long Island City, Queens.
View of SP Weather Station, Long Island City, Queens
The SP Weather Station project was started by Natalie Campbell and Heidi Neilson in 2007 as a way for artists to turn their focus to the weather and create art that reflects or chronicles weather on the site.
Some of the works stick a little too close to the data and actually look like data point plot charts you’d see in a science book. But several of the works are quite surprising with their visual or conceptual punch.
Mike Nystrom's software-generated weather report from June 26, 2009
January 2009 by Mike Estabrook and Vandana Jain shows President Obama’s head as a burning yellow sun collaged on to a grim looking black and white urban scene. Michael Geminder’s simple word piece “CLEAR WARM AND STILL,” with the words laser cut out of a small piece of cardboard is lyrical and effective in conjuring up the conditions of a quiet summer night. Mark Nystrom’s seven digital prints from June 21-27, 2009, transcend the data through digital manipulation. Nystrom uses software like the open source “Processing” program in prints that could be Francis Bacon tornadoes, half clear and crisp; half rubbed out in what look like angry attempts to mask what is real. Beautiful and frenzied, the prints capture something of the mystery of unpredictable weather.
Mike Geminder's Clear, Warm and Still, laser-cut cardboard
Perhaps the most directly observational piece in the show is the photo documentation, April 2009 by Luke Strosnider. The digital collage shows a number of long thin slices of the sky seen at various dates and times. This manipulated documentation captured with a camera hearkens back to the time when the only tool for predicting the weather was the eyes. Here the camera’s eye has captured what the real eye also saw and saved it for posterity. But everything is called into question, even the colors, in this digital piece.
Luke Strosnider, detail
AHN/VHS is run by two artist transplants from New York, Julianne Ahn and Lauren van Haaften-Schick who focus on works on paper–drawings, prints and publications which they exhibit and sell online and through their flat file in the back studio. The two just created a tiny project space in a curio cabinet outside the gallery and they are accepting proposals from artists to install a work of Lilliputian dimensions there. Currently, The Cabinet has a selection of toy-like Planetarium lamps collected by SP Weather Station co-founder Heidi Neilson. The lamps are perfect and their lights project an image of the stars onto the cabinet walls and create a kind of magic box.
The Cabinet, outside the gallery.
SP Weather Station: Weather Reports,” to Aug. 30. AHN/VNS, 319A N. 11th St., 4th floor. info@ahnvhs.com.
4 Comments
I got kinda miffed when I saw the laser cut by Mike Geminder in this post until I saw it as part of a larger installation on the AHN|VHS site. Laser cutting isn’t really that special. This piece is just an LCD font and some skilled button pushing. I know. I do it all day. But in the right context it adds to the whole.
Now something like this: http://www.lostateminor.com/2007/07/28/kako-ueda/ is interesting. All the creativity is done in Illustrator, and then it just requires the correct output.
I think laser cut stuff is interesting, but it can’t stand all by itself. No one marvels at how black the toner is on photocopy art, because photocopies are old news.
If you take away the craft and there’s nothing left, where’s the art?
Why y’all got a weather station up on your roof? Can’t y’all just tune in to the weather channel instead? It’ll prolly save you a few bucks.
Hi Christopher, I see the piece as an update on Lawrence Weiner’s word art pieces. Geminder’s piece is quieter and less self-important. I would have liked the work if it had been in another medium but I liked a lot in the cut out letters on cardboard. The laser manufacturing adds a mechanical and routinized connotation that goes against what we think of as clear warm and still. I’m guessing the artist chose to use such an up-to-the moment tool to make the piece because it is so un-weather like. In that sense the craft is part of the content of the piece.
Rondell, that just cracks me up. Art is always about doing things yourself and mostly it’s about doing things yourself the hard way.
On another note, as soon as I see the Luke Strosnider collage of strips of sky, I was reminded of Spencer Finch’s public art installation on the New York High Line of rectangular window panes based on digital photos of the Hudson. Each window pane is a color derived from a pixel in a photograph of the river at a different moment in time. These colors too are sponge-y, like all our cybered-up photographs. I love the confrontation of the earnest artist with a medium ever susceptible to doctoring. And I am amazed at how our sense of history has lost its authority. Our faith in photos, history, color, truth, the government, science, a man’s word–it’s all in a shocking state of flux.