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The idea is at once exciting and brilliant: snap a photograph, take it apart and then piece it back together, however you want. I can think of few better ways to intervene in reality (without actually intervening, of course) and to reconfigure the world to reveal its, or one’s own, biases. So I expected to see something of the sort at DCKT Contemporary when I went to see “The Middle of the End,” Isidro Blasco’s latest solo show. I expected disfigured realities, unfamiliar points of view or at least some kind of clue to indicate how Isidro Blasco, the master of this cut and re-paste (also in his case, reconstruct) photo process, sees the world. Unfortunately, the show only managed to either suggest that Isidro Blasco sees … |
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Isidro Blasco: The Middle of the End – Jillian Steinhauer
The idea is at once exciting and brilliant: snap a photograph, take it apart and then piece it back together, however you want. I can think of few better ways to intervene in reality (without actually intervening, of course) and to reconfigure the world to reveal its, or one’s own, biases. So I expected to see something of the sort at DCKT Contemporary when I went to see “The Middle of the End,” Isidro Blasco’s latest solo show. I expected disfigured realities, unfamiliar points of view or at least some kind of clue to indicate how Isidro Blasco, the master of this cut and re-paste (also in his case, reconstruct) photo process, sees the world. Unfortunately, the show only managed to either suggest that Isidro Blasco sees the world pretty much as the rest of us see it, or that he sees the world as a number of art objects to be placed in a gallery. Either way, the conclusion is disappointing.
“The Middle of the End” came to New York by way of Atlanta (originally exhibited at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery), and I concede that many of its current problems can probably be traced to this move. Because of space constraints, the New York “Middle of the End” showed seven distinct works of varying sizes. All but one hung on the walls. In Atlanta, by contrast, the show was set up as something closer to one giant, freestanding photo-sculpture. This places it more in line with Blasco’s previous work (usually large in scale, including a number of walk-in constructions) and suggests that the Atlanta version was infinitely more dynamic, since the most compelling New York piece was both the biggest and the only freestanding one—Side Building. Side Building felt like a glimpse of what an Isidro Blasco work is supposed to look like. Measuring 107 x 120 x 72” (roughly 9 x 10 x 6 feet), the construction overwhelmed me with its sheer size. I viewed it head on for a minute, and then began to walk around it, to look at it from different angles, to study it. In the process, a change occurred, and I realized that what I had been looking at initially, the sculpture’s fairly unified front, was precisely that—a front. In seeing the crisscrossing wooden beams in back and those holes that appeared in the construction when its vast, three-dimensionality became apparent, the work’s photographic façade cracked and fell apart.
Which is precisely why the rest of the show failed to excite. By breaking “The Middle of the End” into smaller pieces and hanging most of those pieces on the wall, the folks at DCKT stripped Blasco’s works down to their façades. In the process, they stripped the art of its power. Blasco’s works require the interaction of the viewer with the space, so that she can experience the simultaneous physical sturdiness and metaphysical instability that they exude. Given his ability to visually suggest such a paradox, I suspect the artist is a very talented man; however, I would not rely on this exhibition to tell you so. Works clearly informed as much by architecture as art cannot be successfully reduced to paintings on a wall.
