Richmond
Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University
“The Nameless Hour” explored the oneiric imagination through a variety of sculptural and projection-based installations. Featuring Janine Antoni, Pipilotti Rist, Stephen Cartwright, Spencer Finch, Sigalit Landau, Paul Pfeiffer, and Stephen Vitiello, the show drew its inspiration, as well as its title, from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie. For Bachelard, reverie is not a condition of idle musing but a state that can invigorate the imagination and stir the soul. Collected within the context of the exhibition, the selected works were intended to function as stimuli for such active reverie. Water—and our weightlessness within it—served as a unifying theme, a metaphor for the detached fluidity of the dream state. Landau’s projection DeadSee features the artist floating in the famously saline Dead Sea, buoyantly lounging in the midst of a slowly unraveling spiral of watermelons. The seeming non sequitur of the melons (watermelons perhaps operating at the level of linguistic rather than logical association) lends the piece a dream-like quality, and the artist’s nude body, languid in the aqueous environment, seems suspended in a realm of amniotic fluid. …see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
