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I’m very excited about the openings this Friday and Saturday of Rashid Johnson, Tim Lee and Sudarshan Shetty. While Johnson is pretty new to the scene, Lee and Shetty have had solo shows in New York before and Shetty in particular is bit of a superstar in India.
All three have a deep connection to engaging in the relationship between identity, technology and form: how we interpret our perspectives and thus our personal histories through the lens of advancement in technology and information and how these relationships are embodied in objects, be it burnt offerings as in Johnson, dismantled camera in Lee or disembodied sculptures in Shetty.
I first saw Johnson’s work at a group show at Jack Shaiman. For his solo debut at the irrepressible Nicole Klagsburg, Johnson plays with the shadow of DeBois and other African American philosophers and intellectuals, playing on the model minority myth by creating imaginary “semiotic systems and iconography of a secret society of African-American intelligentsia within a metaphysical landscape removed from time and history. Functioning as investigative reporter and archivist as well as artist, Johnson deploys materials including steel, shea butter, black soap, wax, mirrors, wood, together with found objects to form an installation that effortlessly shifts between media, emphasizing the poetic cadence of his work. Mysticism and nostalgia create interplay among smoke-shrouded portraits, symbolic substances, and menacing forms.” The strongest works in the exhibition are these sculptures, totems if you will, of offerings to the past as debris. The quality of the burnt wax on the wall sculptures are well thought out and the disparate offerings demands the audience’s readings between the lines.
At Cohan and Leslie, Tim Lee presents his third outing, featuring a “trio of diptychs which imagine the recreation of seminal moments in classical music, slapstick comedy and seventies rock.” With video of Glenn Gould’s 1981 remake of his own 1955 version of Bach’s 1741 original, Lee, who cannot play piano, recorded his left and right hands playing the composition separately on video. Shown with separate works playing on Steve Martin and Neil Young. Lee has consistently played with the “impossible”, embracing failure as itself a mode of art production and critique.
On Saturday, Jack Tilton presents the New York return of the sculptor and painter Sudarshan Shetty. Shetty will present a series of mechanical sculptural installations, such as a fragile pot spinning on a sleek motor, a moth-making machine or a pair of automated walking shoes, transform the ordinary objects of everyday life into simple, perfunctory mechanisms. Working on exploring the mechanization of contemporary globalization and the effects on the body, Shetty is definitely one to watch, though his paintings, often drawn from his sculptures, tend to disappoint.
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