STRANGE DUET
Because slick and perfect art can get boring and predictable, it's actually great to see something at the Center for Contemporary Arts stumble a little bit. Lately, with Cyndi Conn at the helm of visual arts programming (though she works with a capable curatorial committee), exhibitions at CCA (1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338) have been stellar, almost suspiciously clean and, for a rough-around-the-edges dubious cultural
pedigree type like myself, disturbingly well-sorted. Which is why I'm happy about all the ways in which
Stranger
, featuring the work of Robert Hernandez and Tom Miller, fails.
Hernandez, working largely in sketch books and possibly napkins, sheetrock, phone books and any other surface friendly to his ink pen, is a sketch artist of enviable skill. His über doodles on board exhibit a sureness of line and a confidence of ability, combined with a wicked sense of cultural distortion and a new millennium, non-academic melange of elements to represent a body of work that ought to be great, but just ain't finished.
Tom Miller, on the other hand, may be presenting work that is altogether too finished. It's good, if sporadically referential to a host of artists and iconographies, but it's also proven and previously exhibited. Miller's engaging thoughts on process and the evolution of his pieces leave one wanting to know what he's doing now, late at night, in his kitchen, his garage, his yard, using more instinct and less graduate school confidence. None of which is bad-it reminds us that CCA is no museum, no pristine künsthalle, no temple to perfect presentation. It's altogether more valuable than that as our living laboratory of ideas and experiments.
HIVE MIND
So you wanna be an installation artist. How done. How 1990. Please spare us all and stick to the basics. Unless, you know, you happen to be good at it. Following a golden period of constructions of compelling, immersive environments and intriguing site specific projects, the larger share of so-called installation art dwindled into needless overly cerebral muck and stranded art lovers with nothing much to do but grin and pretend it was interesting or call bullshit and go back to basics. However, being in an unfamiliar and stimulating situation is still one of the sweetest pleasures of contemporary art, if you stumble into the den of an artist who can pull it off. In this case, the den is a hive and I think Munson Hunt succeeds because of intention. She's got no pretensions about what it means, because it comes more from her bones than her brain.
You're standing in a darkened room, with oiled hive-cones or bee bodies-it doesn't matter too much how you think of them, because the effect is decidedly monolithic, druidic, ancient and meaningful. It would be enough to stand amidst these quiet, carved giants, to smell the oil on the surface, to rub the smooth round at their glistening edges and to breath in their harmonic, vibratory scent, but there's more. A video of bees, busy working together toward a goal that isn't clear to the human eye, but is instinctively pure to the human ethic, is projected on the back wall and the working of all those bee brains, the clockwork hive mind, is sonically interpreted through a collaboration with local vocal sensation Molly Sturges, raising the hairs down the back of your neck that extra antenna-like millimeter. When you've had your fill, quietly leave Chiaroscuro (439 Camino del Monte Sol, 992-0711) and walk back out into a world that has become, somehow, a little bit better.
TERRIBLE PERFECTION
You will have a lot of reactions to Adrain Chesser's photography exhibition,
I have something to tell you
. Some of them will be emotional and of a level you weren't really prepared for. Some of them will be more difficult to pin down. Many of them
will prick the scabs of your personal experience in an alarming, uncomfortable and beautiful way. One thought, which I think is important, is that this exhibition is what photography is for. This is why the momentary capture of images is important and necessary.
Chesser presents a series of portraits of his closest friends at the Santa Fe Art Institute (1600 St. Michael's Drive, 424-5050). He invited each of them to sit in a chair, against a backdrop poignant for its construction from the curtains of the house the artist was raised in, and he photographed them. At some point in the session he would say, "I have something to tell you…" and proceed to reveal something intimate and difficult to absorb about himself. He managed to capture the reactions to his statements and the expressions range from dramatic to stunned to open tears to wide-eyed uncertainty. It is a challenging and brave way to use both a camera and one's friends, but the result is genuinely moving and honest and about how to be alive and to communicate.
After viewing each portrait (or series of portraits), proceed to the center of the gallery, sit in the same chair, against the same ornate backdrop, pick up the headphones and see yourself in the portraits staring back at you as Chesser's tale fills your ears.
