ARTISTS: Ken Fandell, Rob Fischer, Chad Gerth, Brian Kapernekas, Janice Kerbel, Euan Macdonald, Scott Roberts, Cristian Silva, Joe Sola, Christine Tarkowski, Joel Tauber, Amir Zaki

UCR/California Museum of Photography (October, 2005)

Like A Charm
The present is a hard place to live, often lacking magic and providing little excitement or opportunity to re-imagine the world. The desire to escape the assembly-line drudgery of daily life is instinctual. Cult membership and karaoke are some of the reactionary manifestations, but occasionally the present astonishes—amphibian rain, parallel universes, and simultaneous discovery of the same theory––creating a powerful present-tense experience and encouraging a reevaluation of who and what we are. Logically explicable, though nonetheless emotionally incomprehensible, these magical moments are so rare that more often than not we find ourselves trapped somewhere between nostalgic yearning and optimistic anticipation. It is this uncertain but fluid space that the works in Still, Things Fall From The Sky occupy––incorporating a swarm of ideas that blur the relationship between reality and imagined ideals, exploring the fertile terrain of myth and fable, and exposing the seductive masking of distress by beauty—as if to navigate the space between past and future in order to give the present more presence.
The relationship between reality and the ideal as explored in some of the works has much to do with the desire for immortality born of a God-like power to re-craft the world to one’s own specifications. Such an impulse is not necessarily narcissistic. It is instead driven by an altruistic urge to transform and correct, to create a more desirable universe. Janice Kerbel’s Bird Island Project (2000–ongoing) is one such place. Kerbel has concocted a paradisiacal island of indescribable beauty—situated above the Tropic of Cancer in the Great Bahama Bank—filled with unique bird species, original plant life, and fantastic real-estate opportunities. The jewel of the island—the green-and-blue tailed Exuma Emerald (2002)—is exclusively suited to its conditions. Solitary, fractious, and territorial, it hovers by batting its iridescent wings sixty-eight times per second to feed on hibiscus flowers every eight to ten minutes, making its migration from Bird Island impossible. The Sky Above Here (Seattle, WA) (2003) by Ken Fandell, is another work that confuses fact with fiction. A mural-sized image of the sky formed by collaging hundreds of digital shots of the Seattle sky into one seamless photograph to create a deliriously romantic image. The passing of time captured in the wildly diverse cloud formations and variation of hues ranging from stormy to clear, salmon to turquoise, are breathtaking and reminiscent of paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Casper David Friedrich.
Complementing Kerbel’s and Fandell’s Arcadian vision is Amir Zaki’s Untitled (OH_04X) (2004), a spectacular and impossible image of two Richard Neutra ‘Case Study’ houses teetering precariously over a Los Angeles hillside. Shot from below, the skewed perspective and digital manipulation of the photograph—removing the vertical columns and cantilevered supports needed to secure the building in place—creates a heady and unsettling image of impending doom. Conceived as utopian structures designed to revolutionize and re-define modern urban living in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, they have since become fragile elitist dwelling that have been significantly altered to accommodate frequent earthquakes and mudslides. Their eventual demise and disintegration into the surrounding landscape is foreshadowed in Rob Fisher’s Accidental/Intentional (2004/05), a series of nine photographs—individual portraits of abandoned trailers, caravans, and mobile homes in various states of dilapidation—shot from his car window in the rural Midwest. In each, a raging fire (painted directly on the photographic print) consumes the already deteriorating structure. Painting re-asserts its authority over photography by enlivening the clinical documentation with the sensuality of paint making the experience all the more palpable.
Reminiscent of warp drives, worm holes, and intergalactic travel—popularized by Gene Roddenberry’s progressive Star Trek (1966)—Scott Roberts’s Maquette for Black Hole (2005) is a highly imaginative rendering of the evolutionary end-point of a massive star. It takes us on a voyage “where no man has gone before,” then “beams” us harshly back to earth through the stark materiality and makeshift nature of the object. Monumental in scale, the exhilarating and melodramatic effects of the cardboard-and-tape sculpture stun on a visceral level. A similarly powerful illusion is conjured by Brian Kapernekas’s Quicksand Pit (2005)—a free standing installation evoking a swamp surrounded by cattails made entirely from tape and cardboard. Quicksand Pit sparks many filmic references where bit players and villains are engulfed by a living slime. The color and texture of the tape melds with the surface of the hardwood floor making the illusion all the more palpable despite its provisional nature. The existence of quicksand is still a contested issue belonging more to the realm of myth and fable than scientific fact.
Suspension of disbelief is not only a required condition for viewing much of the work in Things Fall From The Sky but in many instances a preferred one. The desire to lose oneself in an imaginary space existing outside traditional belief structures, rules, and regulations allows for a free flow of ideas unrestrained by convention. File Cabinet (2004), a video projection by Euan Macdonald, presents willful abandon in the improbable form of a small wooden cabinet. Quietly subversive, the top drawer opens to evict its filed pages. Floating upwards then falling to the floor, each page, a promissory note, escapes its confines and with it the burden of unending obligations. Searching For The Impossible: The Flying Project (2003), by Joel Tauber, takes us on an absurdist journey—the artist attempts to fly without mechanical assistance. During Tauber’s thirty-two minute odyssey he leaps from cliffs flapping his arms like a bird, experiments with a hand glider, and makes many failed attempts to ride in an air balloon. Finally, after inspiration from an 18th century drawing by Pierre Blanchard, suggesting music could power flight, he ascends 150 feet into sky while playing the bagpipes—which helped inflate a number of the forty-six helium balloons that kept him afloat.
Flight of a more violent kind is apparent in Joe Sola’s Studio Visit (2005), a video projection of the artist diving out his studio window, leaving his companion dumbstruck amidst the falling glass. Inspired by daydreaming during endless faculty meetings, Studio Visit is a release from monotony as well as a debunking of myths associated with masculinity—Sola worked with a professional stunt artist to realize this work—and a playful nod to the masochistic endurance performance strategies of the 1970s.
There is a certain perverse beauty to tragedy—a life ruined or cut short—usually accompanied by a romanticized vision of what that life once was and what it might have been. Chad Gerth’s life-size photograms of smashed car windshields have the same effect. In the dark and foreboding images, webs of red, yellow, and white hairline cracks move across the surface as if tracing the memory of the crash. The inevitability of death and the ephemeral nature of love is expressed in Cristian Silva’s Orgy (2004), a series of seventeen miniature Lambda prints of copulating flies. A contemporary vanitàs expressed so economically in the life span of a fly, Orgy reminds one of the brevity of life and transience of earthly pleasures. Although fertile, athletic, and vigorous, flies generally symbolize putrefaction, disintegration, and decay.
The expression “an English man’s home is his castle” portrays home, naively, as a place of safety, refuge, and shelter regardless of its appearance. Christine Tarkowski critiques such ideas in a series of works that explore habitat, vulnerability, and protection. Cabin (after Theodore Kaczynski) (2000)—a lightweight collapsible structure with wooden logs screen-printed onto the surface—is a scale replica of the Unabomber’s home in the Montana wilderness. With its gnarled and worn façade and chaotic interior, Ted Kaczynski’s cabin was transported to a Sacramento courtroom to be used as evidence of his unhinged mind. In Tarkowski’s version there

is no question of penetration, the windows and the doors are permanently locked. In Monuments to Indestructible Living (2004)—a series of blueprints depicting destroyed and derelict World War II bunkers—Tarkowski exposes the inevitable demise of all protective structures; the bunkers, now ruined, contradict their original function.
Fictional tropical islands, cosmic cardboard entities, and people who jump out of windows are just some of the activities in the rich and enigmatic works that make up Still, Things Fall From The Sky. Vast and fluid, the exhibition’s diverse artistic strategies—intergalactic exploration, impossible architecture, and scientific enquiry— combine to create an uncommon and arresting synergy. Ultimately, Still, Things Fall From The Sky provides a space to author new legends and reinvent the world the way one believes it should be, incorporating frailty and imperfection alongside the utopian and the ideal, to embrace revolutionary desires and capture for ourselves a moment of present-tense magic.

STILL, THINGS FALL FOM THE SKY
UCR/CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY, OCTOBER 2005