Aside from being teeming, Mumbai and Tokyo don’t have much in common. Neither, it might seem, do the city-inspired works of Kermit Berg and Delna Dastur, which face each other on the walls of Gallery plan b. Berg’s photographic collages and Dastur’s mixed-media “drawings” on canvas both riff on patterns and grids, and both have a specific geographic identity. But Berg’s “Tokyo Night Office” is aggressively contemporary — there are no temples, kabuki or geisha in his neon-lit Tokyo — while Dastur’s “Encroachment” draws on centuries of Indian culture.
Berg, who lives in Berlin and San Francisco, is not the first outsider to see Tokyo as an empire of signs. Japan’s capital is crowded with text, and Berg makes Photoshop combinations of subway maps, ad posters and neon logos, all in mash-ups of Chinese characters, Roman letters and Japanese syllabaries. He layers images in ways that range from witty to nearly abstract. The playful “Lemon Tea” conflates a lineup of beverages in one of the city’s ubiquitous vending machines with the workers behind windows in an office building; both are products on display in a consumer wonderland.
The photographer, who’s had transit-themed shows in New York and Berlin, is drawn to Tokyo’s subway and commuter train system, whose basic design is comprehensible to any urbanite. But Berg doesn’t show the throngs for which the city’s trains and stations are famed. Instead, he focuses on motifs and colors, turning twists of green neon into abstract lines and glorying in the contrast between night skies and vivid artificial light. (The underlying photographs were probably made before the Fukushima nuclear power-plant meltdown led to Tokyo’s dimming.) The most striking of these pictures is the near-abstract “Red Square,” a swoosh of black and a burst of green on a hot red field. It could be anything, but it feels like Tokyo.
Dastur’s work is gentler. The artist, who divides her time between Mumbai and the District, draws on fabric design and Mughal illustrated manuscripts. Although one canvas is titled “Urban Dominance,” these works are not overbearing. Indeed, the most citified thing about them is their lack of green. The artist prefers blues, reds and blacks, which she often adorns with gold leaf (another reference to Persian-style books). She builds honeycombed grids with wooden Indian textile stamps, layers gels, gessoes and pastels over acrylic washes and finishes it off with charcoal. These cityscapes may not be bustling — there are no people, save for a few sequestered Mughal lovers in “Secret Affairs” — but their depths suggest the cultural archaeology of a place built from multiple civilizations.
Moby: Destroyed
There are plenty of patterns in “Destroyed,” an exhibition of photographs by techno musician Moby being shown by Irvine Contemporary at Montserrat House. Chicago’s street grid, the windows of a large Berlin office block and the arrangement of partially melted snow in New York’s Central Park are among the traveling musician’s subjects. But the essential theme of these crisp, dramatically lit images is aloneness. There are crowds of people in some shots, but they’re on the other side of the stage, unknowable. Other photos — including the one that gives the show its name — depict the sleek sterility of airports, highways and hotel rooms. The word “destroyed” is part of an electronic sign’s message warning what will happen to luggage that becomes separated from its owner. The crushing alienation is artfully expressed but maybe a little over-dramatized. Doesn’t Moby have backing musicians, a road manager, publicists? If he misplaces his bag, there’s probably someone on staff to retrieve it before it becomes an existential metaphor.
_1329862681.jpg)
Loading...
Comments