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Email PageShifting Measures
May 3, 2007- June 2, 2007
Reception: May 3, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Melora Kuhn
ZieherSmith
531 W 25th StMelora Kuhn’s new body of work explores the dynamics of human relationships, pursuing themes of miscommunication and loss through the language and imagery of warfare and revolution. Typified by a misalignment of planes and angles, her images concentrate on alterations, both miniscule and paradigm, in optical and metaphysical perception. Through disparate vantage points and sources from wide ranging locales, she condenses personal and historical references into a narrative reflecting our precarious age.
Explosion is a diptych of married opposites; the ghost of a military man stands triumphantly, though his backdrop is a city under siege. His female partner is circumscribed with a blank white backdrop, hovering slightly, ungrounded by her fuming inner state. Internal versus external struggles and viewpoints co-exist here in both male-female dynamics and historical accuracy. The imagery is not always as it seems, for though the pair immediately summon the American Civil War or perhaps the French Revolution, the source material for the female’s burning center is actually that of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
In dual paintings of the Italian Dolomites, Shift (Left) and Shift (Right), a crooked viewfinder attempts to reconcile one’s gaze between the two slightly drifting perspectives. Focus is then disoriented by coinciding measured scales. In enigmatic increments of six, these markers provide not references to scale within the canvases but to the history of this serene vista — redolent of a local story of a gondola, whose cable was accidentally nicked by a spy plane, and upon final impact, the car was flattened to a height of six inches.
In Family Portrait, a regal portrait of the Romanov family fractured into flat square sheets of muted, monochromatic pigment, Kuhn has re-scripted her subject’s histories into visual splinters— accurate for its absence of two figures, yet askew by its removal of different bodies than those mysteriously missing from the ex-emperor’s final resting place. The artist’s concern for the potential of disintegration in the family unit is further dramatized by the actual gruesome fate of the sitters.
The extraction of weaponry in White Rifle acts as a hopeful revisionism. Taken from the anonymous daguerreotype of a soldier, Kuhn re-envisions an unarmed memory of the forgotten man, a loving wish to negate the violent cause of this memento. Kuhn sees the image as an artifact of lost possibilities.
In related sculptures, Kuhn presents a seemingly straightforward porcelain tea-set; the sylvan scenes depicted on the cup, saucer and creamer, however, are alternate views of a quiet inlet revealing a distant settlement engulfed in blue smoke. A sequence of cast plaster busts further disrupts expectations; with classic commemorations as her inspiration, Kuhn finishes the surfaces with faux wood grain, tattered silver leaf and molten, milky wax, exteriors that belie their common plaster cores.
This is Kuhn’s third solo show at ZieherSmith. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. In addition to being the 2007 featured artist at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she will have a solo exhibition at doART in Seoul, Korea this October.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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ZieherSmith was last updated: 2009-01-07
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