White Flag Projects: Saturday, 12 March 2011
Karthik Pandian: Elements of StyleMarch 12 – April 23, 2011
Opening reception Saturday March 12, 7–10 PM
Conversation with the artist, Sunday March 13, 2 PM
What happens when history finds its gaze in the mirror? How does it regard itself? Its figure? Its look? Like the exhalation of a stale gas, this reflection bespeaks a spiritual emptiness that pervades Karthik Pandian's exhibition Elements of Style, at White Flag Projects, St. Louis. The third and final installment of a trilogy of exhibitions that draws on the artist's two-year investigation into the celestial, archaeological and architectural milieu of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Collinsville, Illinois, Elements of Style presents an ensemble of new sculptural, sound, light and wall works that brings this body of research home to the locale Pandian's research began.
Using the rammed earth technique and salvaged mirror pane glass from his 2010 exhibition Before the Sun at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, Pandian has created a new large-scale sculpture that bisects the gallery diagonally into two triangular halves. Inspired by the persistence of the Japanese folding screen as an icon of chic, generalized spirituality, the sculpture, entitled Cahokia Byōbu, embraces the functional and decorative possibilities of the form, while playing on the subject of landscape and pastiching the artist's own fascination with ancient and modern entanglements.
The two wall works, or Shards, featured in the exhibition are salvaged from the formwork used to create the rammed earth pillars featured in the artist's exhibition Unearth, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Exhibited for the first time at White Flag Projects, the fragments bear the traces of the pillars' varied earthen surface and are incised with the grid that has come to symbolize the archaeological-architectural horizon dividing the trilogy as a whole.
Finally, Pandian has created a new work in the tradition of the son et lumière shows that animate architectural monuments from French châteaux to the Pyramids of Giza on a nightly basis. A program of shifting colored light inspired by the lighting design of the Cahokia Mounds Interpretive Center is synchronized to a field recording of the sunset during the vernal equinox as heard from the apex of Monk's Mound. While the sound and light show represents a significant time- based feature of the project, Elements of Style is Pandian's first exhibition to focus on sculpture and wall works with no moving image component.
Elements of Style will open with a reception Saturday evening March 12, from 7 -10 PM. There will be a public conversation with the artist the following afternoon, Sunday March 13 at 2 PM. The exhibition continues through April 23. Admission to both events as well as regular viewing hours is free of charge.
posted by Bill Barrett at 4:48 PM
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