New Museum / Met Breuer / Whitney
Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest
Pipilotti Rist's exhibition entitled Pixel Forest, is a three-floor multimedia installation at the New Museum. I went during opening weekend so it was extremely crowded. Upon entering each floor, every nook and cranny was filled or being explored. Still I got the sense that this was what the exhibition had been designed for. Rist's pieces throughout the exhibition invited viewers to engage and interact or make themselves at home with cushions, carpet, and even beds. This was not something to experience at a distance, but I was being invited into an environment Rist had created. I found her mirrored videos mesmerising if not a bit scattered. I found the component of movement in the exhibition intriguing—movement implied by the ever changing visuals of film, light, and color, as well my own movement through whispy curtains with video projections on them and a dense sea of pulsating lights hanging from the ceiling. I think my experience would have been much different had there been far fewer people there, however, I do believe that I did absorb some of the dreamy tones of her exploration of the world we live in. There is also the technology component. Specifically when I entered the floor with the beds and when I looked down the hallway of triangular prisms jutting out of the wall for people to stick their heads into, I thought, what a funny way to consume media.
Diane Arbus: In the Beginning
The Diane Arbus exhibition entitled In the Beginning, is a collection of images from the first seven years of her career on display at the Met Breuer. The randomization in placement of the images speaks to the oddity of Arbus and her images. In these images we her matter-of-fact attention to detail is still heavily present, seen in places, objects, and events, more than portraits. The Met Breuer contextualizes their shows with a historical lens. I felt that these early images led very nicely into the well-known images we associate with Arbus in the photo book room and the room of the ten photographs. I liked the layout of the exhibition, but I felt it made the images a little hard to digest. Everything was very solitary but close together and in no order making it feel a little claustrophobic for me instead of being able to experience them as gems of Arbus's artistry. Maybe it's just me but I found it easier to look at the exhibition in book form which they had on display in one of the following rooms.
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
The Kerry James Marshall exhibition entitled Mastry, is a retrospective spanning the artist's 35-year career. The exhibition brought to light many of the visual and artistic influences Marshall has used in creating his work as well as expose many facets of racially charged topics, issues, trends, and historical figures and events. Upon arriving at the exhibition, I was amazed but the sheer amount of work. Marshall provides a wide array of work exploring black history and identity. I was particularly interested in Marshall's attention to color, for example, in his black on black painting as well as in the black and blue photo in the photograph section, "Black Artist (Studio View)" 2002, speaking to a reclamation of blackness and an embrace of skin tone both visually and emotionally.
Bonus Dreamlands exhibition @ the Whitney
Dreamlands was comprised of a number of different kinds of video installations, the ones I was most drawn to were the more immersive ones, including Hito Steyerl’s "Factory of the Sun," where viewers sit on lounge chairs in a gridded, Tron-like space to watch an engaging disco-science-fiction parody of a video game and Ben Coonley’s 3-D 360-degree video "Trading Futures," projected on the inside of a geodesic dome.