Content provided in partnership with
Siobhan Hapaska at Tanya Bonakdar - New York
Art in America, Sept, 2002 by Sarah Valdez
Irish-born, London-based conceptual artist Siobhan Hapaska's latest New York show included an installation, a photograph and a short video, each of which cryptically explored the interplay of nature and artifice. The main gallery hosted a forest of trees. Most of these were dead evergreens that had turned brown and lost their needles. On them, lovingly or mockingly, Hapaska had hung transparent glass Christmas balls carefully packed with fresh, green pine needles. Two faux evergreen trees, likewise without needles, also stood in the space. Synthetic greenery was scattered on the floor beneath them. Viewers could walk among the denuded trees, listening to the accompanying soundtrack of howling wind and occasional jingling bells, while meditating on the dueling forces of presence and absence, of life and death, and of the real and its imitation. The installation was also an exercise in perspective. Depending where one stood in the grove, certain of the trees disappeared from view or changed in scale.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
The show also included a lone, large C-print depicting a man in a piney wilderness looking at a robot that lies like Jesus in Michelangelo's Pieta, seemingly defunct, on a rock. One suspects that Hapaska means to suggest that the cyborg, being a product of man, is also part of nature. But her real intentions remain far from clear.
Her video, Mayday, features a male-female couple enacting incomprehensible rituals. They exchange gifts and drink something together by the sea; they drive to a modern house in a BMW; they buy logs from a woodsman. They take their logs to the beach, set them up parallel to one another on the sand and wrap them in fuzzy blankets. Then they lie face down on the logs and place blinking red lights on their behinds; Hapaska's camera pans away. This mysterious pseudo-narrative, which takes place in silence, is drawn out and thoroughly enervating. Viewers are invited to wonder what these two are up to, but all speculation is futile.
Hapaska's work might remind one of Samuel Beckett's tragic comedy Waiting for Godot, in which two friends, Estragon and Vladimir, spend their days on a barren country road near a tree that has no leaves, waiting for Godot (i.e., God), who never comes. Like Beckett's play, which is initially funny but draws the humor out for so long that the effect turns stark and disturbing, Hapaska's latest show amplifies the desire to find meaning by providing none. It's clever, at times even beautiful, but not particularly inviting.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History