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Intervention

WUNDERLUST BERLIN

Kopeikin Gallery

8810 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, CA 90069

January 12, 2008 - February 9, 2008

A group show of fourteen artists from Berlin, Wunderlust Berlin showcases a vibrant cross-section of work using a wide variety of media. Given the large number of artists in the relatively small space, there isn’t really a “dud” in the show. Guest curator Laurie De Chiara has done an excellent job in compressing a wide survey into a small space and all of the work is worth seeing, but a few pieces in particular deserve special mention.

One artist in the show with whose work I was already familiar is Albrecht Schaefer. His simple and provocative interventions into space or found materials never disappoint. This is true for his partial shredding of a paper lamp, leaving a complex coil of wire and paper to trail from the ceiling and suggest both a strand of DNA and some kind of architectural ruin. By leaving the light bulb on and left in place, Schaefer reminds us of what the object once was and how easily nearly any object’s form and function can be changed in a few simple steps.

Like Schaefer’s piece, Wolfgang May’s Mobile Treehouse project was another great find in this exhibition. May takes the form of both a triptych of photographs and a series of drawings imagining the mobile treehouse pictured in the photos traveling the world. The photographs, which show a generic treehouse mounted atop a thin wooden pole slowly being pulled upright on the back of a trailer, speak both to the nostalgia and monumentality of a child’s secret house in the trees. At the same time, the portability of the treehouse underscores the failure of the scale model (it’s impossible to tell whether the house is functional or not) to live up to the romanticism of nostalgia or monumentality when parked in front of the Hollywood Hills, as it is in one drawing.

The other great and simple act of intervention in the show is Eva-Maria Wilde’s collages of identical photographs. A copy of the photograph (or several copies) was cut up into perfectly round discs and glued over the same spots where that part of the image would ordinarily fall. The content of the photographs are mundane interiors, but the “bubbles” of the overlaid copies produces the uncanny suggestion of thought bubbles. Given that there are no people present, this process produces the wonderful impression of simple, ordinary spaces dreaming of themselves.

- Nicholas Grider

(*Images, from top to bottom: David Hatcher, Wunderlust Berlin, January 12 - February 9, 2008; Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Art forms that appeal (Theodore Kaczynski), 2005, From the series: Twenty-twenty-twenty, Silkscreen on plexiglass, 200 x 143 cm, Paul Kopeikin Gallery, courtesy of Paul Kopeikin Gallery. Warren Neidich, Wunderlust Berlin, January 12 - February 9, 2008; Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Earthling 2, Café Bravo, 2007, C-Print, 187 x 220 cm, Courtesy of Paul Kopeikin Gallery. Wolfgang May, Wunderlust Berlin, January 12 - February 9, 2008; Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Courtesy of Paul Kopeikin Gallery. Eva-Maria Wilde, Wunderlust Berlin, January 12 - February 9, 2008; Paul Kopeikin Gallery, Courtesy of Paul Kopeikin Gallery.)

Posted by Nicholas Grider on 1/20/08

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