In the exhibition “Directions: Cyprien Gaillard and Mario Garcia Torres” both artists are described as conceptual artists “that examine architectural and artistic “ruins” of the recent past.” (Hirschorn). Gaillard is said to capture the disintegration of the tangible objects that exemplify utopian ideal of rationality that created physical structures that seemingly lack a human element in both photography and film. Torres presents still images in the form of a traditional slide show to inquire about art’s permanence. He presents the finds of his expedition to the Grapevine Manor in St. Croix with the intention of documenting the mosaics of the late Daniel Buren as he had explored many other avant-garde artists. He found the mosaics and the hotel in a state of advanced deterioration, walls collapsing and nature creeping in.
As you approach the large tables of glass museum cases and peer into to top at Gaillard’s still images, you feel like you are looking at sets of butterfly wings or pieces of paper in a museum. Each Polaroid is placed into a diamond grid along with other images related by location, form, etc set in a curved piece of matte board. The subjects matter varies from parks, bridges, graveyards, neighborhoods, architecture, etc., but always concentrating on the objects people put faith into to be a permanent reminder of ideals or people they wanted to preserve. The repetition, size and placement reminds us that these objects often fail in their primary purpose because they slowly become forgotten and disappear from memory and then the physical world. All of these elements cause the objects documented to become not individual images of objects, but one form caught not in one place but in the single state of being swept away with time. The compositions often place modern and antiquated objects and architecture together as if to say that our modern ideals and structures are no different in their fate.
Walking into Torres’ installation, you are presented with two projectors clicking in unison, and a vinyl record player emitting a relaxed music track that then falls away into the voice of the artist telling the story of the hotel that his body of work concentrates on. One projector cycles through the images Torres captured of the crumbling walls, and abandoned objects and places he found during his visit to the hotel while the other cycles though but repeats as single image of the hotel during it’s prime with people smiling and lounging around the pool overlooking the beach. The single shot repeating representing the glorified version of the hotel, the memories of the people who were there is the only thing that will be the only thing that does not change (after we leave a place it begins to change). The second projector cycles through images of a place transforming; showing the ephemeral nature of the objects we would believe should last as a hotel devoid of guest becomes a part of the landscape either through decomposition, or being overtaken. This statement is epitomized by the juxtaposition of two images of the pool one full of water and life the other empty in all contexts.
Although Gaillard’s still image creations, and Torres’ slideshow differ at the basic level of medium, Polaroid versus slide film, and that the subject matter differs in that Gaillard gathers many locations while Torres concentrates on the demise of one place, there are similarities. Both document the objects that we believe will last particularly architecture as well as using media that are slowly descending into antiquity. Another way they are similar in that they both use repetition but in diverse ways. Gaillard uses the sheer number of images to imitate the ambiguity objects fall into as a result of time as they do in actuality while Torres uses repitition in two ways. In one instance showing the unique permanent nature of memory associated with location and in the other showing the ravages of time on a physical structure without the protection of human intervention. Lastly, the two contrast in that Gaillard concentrates solely on the process of decompositional transformation while Torres’ work encompasses the continuous nature of time recognizing the existence of the island before and after the hotel.
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