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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SP Weather Station: Weather Reports,” to Aug. 30. AHN/VNS, 319A N. 11th St., 4th floor. info@ahnvhs.com.
