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| Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun | Carousel
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Imagining a child imagining
Part carnival — part mausoleum — "In Their Minds..." creates a vacuum that tugs at your inner child.
By ROBERT G. EDELMAN
Offoffoff.com
How do memories of childhood manifest themselves to an
artist like Hans Op de Beeck? Judging by this show, op
de Beeck's image of youth combines a magical aura, a
twist of the ineffable and a sense of the uniqueness
of a child's imagination. He makes every attempt to
connect with this ever increasingly remote experience
for adults, as it disappears into the past, with
varied explorations of the intimate world of childhood
fantasy.
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| | | HANS OP DE BEEK | Exhibition: In Their Minds....
Installation by: Hans op de Beek.
| | SCHEDULE | March 4 - April 2, 2005
Gallery: Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Room 213
New York NY
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10-6
Phone: (212) 243-3335
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This reviewer had to walk through the exhibition
several times before getting a sense of what was the
focus of the drawings, sculpture, illuminated
photographs and videos that are on display at
Klagsbrun. Having encountered the artist's work only
at his Basel Art Unlimited installation in 2004 (he
had a show at Team Gallery in 2000 and in 2003, he was
Belgium's artist in residence at the MoMA/P.S.1 Studio
Program), the range of media made this exhibition
appear, at first, to be a survey show. The second time
around however, made it clear that this was a
conceptual installation that established a mood and an
environment, built around the highly original
inventiveness of children, both pleasant and
forbidding.
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| Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun | | Blender
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The show opens with a set of drawings, seemingly
studies for either an installation or a wayfarer's
visual journal, with ambiguous notations. The words
are perhaps the musings of children, free to project
their own images on the landscape. These drawings
entitled "Determination" function for the artist as a
break from his media works, with text. He might use
them later as a source for one of his miniature installations, which op de Beeck has created with
disorienting results in the past.
Upon entering the large space at Klagsbrun, a row of
large, illuminated photographs of six children, each
with their eyes closed, are installed along one wall.
All are smiling mischievously; the artist had
instructed them to imagine themselves someplace else,
or to be someone else. In the intentionally darkened
room, the children's faces glow with an unfettered
glee, an internal radiance hard to imagine on the face
of any relatively functional adult. Part of the
pleasure of viewing these photos (as the show title
suggests) is trying to imagine what the children might
be thinking, where in their minds they've gone or who
they have become.
In the same room, there are three sculptures, if you
can call them that, that represent adult devices
invented to entertain children; a shrouded carousel,
and two shopping mall rocking machines, a car and a
helicopter, painted mostly a dull black. Meant to
entertain kids while their parents are otherwise
engaged or resting from shopping, op de Beeck has
transformed these pacifiers into a form of black
comedy — the machines more a threat now than an
entertainment.
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| | ...they recreate a place without human
habitation, leaving it to the viewer to project their
own narrative to fill the void. |
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The shrouded carousel is out of a surrealist dream, a
macabre and timeless mausoleum for childhood. Does op
de Beeck want the viewer to tie in this image with the
children's imaginings, or rather expect the viewer to
connect directly with this iconic conundrum? This
vagueness of intention is emblematic of op de Beeck's
work, especially in his meticulously fabricated
dioramas. Large and small, they recreate a place
without human habitation, leaving it to the viewer to
project their own narrative to fill the void, not
unlike being behind a movie camera without a script.
In the last room is a video projected on an entire
wall of another carousel, this one the more
traditional version, which very slowly begins to turn.
In "Bender", the motion of the horses (riderless, of
course) begins to blur, and the ambient sounds become
slightly louder and harder to discriminate. Slowly the
motion ceases, and we are returned to a kind of visual
silence. Then the process begins again and we're taken
for another ride, a chance to ponder the concepts of
time, motion and memory. Op de Beeck is a maker of a
spare visual poetry, rooted in childhood hopes and
dreams, yet veiled with the darker implications of the
world of adults. In the middle is the creative
impulse, accessible to all.
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MARCH 31, 2005
OFFOFFOFF.COM • THE GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK
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