Featuring: Gretchen Bennett, Steve Brekelmans, Ryan Gander, Carsten Höller, Christian Marclay, Paul Morrison, Steve Roden, and Ben Rubin
January 16 – May 5, 2007
Western Bridge began 2007 with Kit Bashing, a group show on appropriation and archives, and Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet, 2002. These exhibitions concluded a series of three shows built around Paul Morrison’s commissioned wall painting mesophyte.
Marclay’s synchronized four-channel video installation is one of the treasures of the William and Ruth True Collection. The southernmost gallery at Western Bridge was designed to accommodate the spatial requirements of Video Quartet, whose forty linear feet present an inventive and rich audiovisual collage of quick cuts drawn from the broad history of sound cinema. Working with film clips as a DJ does with sound samples, Marclay finds music in cacophony.
Kit Bashing looked at Paul Morrison’s mesophyte as the product of a specific kind of use artists make of archives. Kit Bashing cast the artist not as archivist, but as a disruptive force within the categorical order of the archive. The title is derived from Steven Brekelmans’ Drums (Kit Bashing), 2006, named after the practice of repurposing existing scale model kit parts to create novel designs. Ryan Gander spelled out the title of his A Phantom of Appropriation in neon letters derived from other artists’ works, then broke each letter, leaving only a ghost of the original poach. For the apartment, Western Bridge commissioned a set of works from Gretchen Bennett that created Brooklyn cityscapes using the kinds of stickers (skateboard brands, record label logos) that multiply on urban surfaces.
Review:
https://www.thestranger.com/seattle/model-behavior/Content?oid=196566
Photos: Mark Woods
