Salina Art Center

Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence

Opening Reception
Thursday, December 11, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
Opening remarks at 5:30 pm

The Salina Art Center announces Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence, a traveling exhibition of contemporary art that examines notions of absence, disappearance, and loss, on view in the Art Center galleries December 12, 2008 through February 15, 2009.

Long before large art exhibitions and blockbuster shows, crowds were awed by traveling shows called “phantasmagoria” in which stories were performed with the use of magic lanterns and rear projections, creating dancing shadows and frightening theatrical effects. Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence is an exhibition that draws on forms of representation linked with traditions of fantasy and magic, and reframes them around contemporary issues. The exhibition curator, José Roca, has selected twelve artists for the exhibition who create works that often reflect on ideas of absence and loss, sometimes using ghostly effects and immaterial mediums such as shadows, fog, mist, and breath. These artists’ approaches range from the festive to the ironic, counterbalancing the emotionally charged, often somber implications of their subject matter.

Although the representation of shadows has always been present in art, the use of actual shadows as an integral part of the artwork is a rather recent phenomenon. The shadow—literally, the absence of light—represents something that is beyond the object yet inseparable from it. In many of the works included in Phantasmagoria, shadows are used to allude to death, the obscure, and the unnamable, and to construct stories of loss and disappearance. In several of these pieces, the artists utilize shadow theater, as in the South African artist William Kentridge’s political tales, or French artist Christian Boltanski’s shadows from a rotating figurine, recalling imagery from the carnival, as well as figurines used to celebrate the Mexican day of the dead. In the works of Brazilian artist Regina Silveira and Danish artist Julie Nord, subjects project paradoxical images that often contradict or complement their meaning. Some of these works reference an absent body, present only by its cast shadow. By using contemporary means of “illusion,” the work Sustained Coincidence (Subsculpture 8) (2007), by Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, directly invokes the eighteenth century phantasmagoric shows. It actively engages viewers in the construction of their own shadows by moving around an empty room, where light from 36 incandescent bulbs are controlled by a computerized surveillance system that generates an interactive environment of overlapping shadows. In the words of the artist, “confrontation with one’s own shadow has a very uncanny effect, as the perspective is updated in real time to match our movement, contrary to our natural expectation of a predictable incidence of light either by the position of the sun or static artificial lights.”

Mist, breath, and fog are often associated with mystery; in their double status as distinguishable yet almost nonexistent phenomena, they suggest disappearance or absence. In Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó’s striking installation Experiencing Cinema (2004), fog is employed as a curtain onto which family photos are projected, addressing the fleeting nature of memories and the images that attempt to record them. In Oscar Muñoz’s Aliento (2000), the viewer’s breath on a series of mirrors reveals—albeit briefly—the image of someone who disappeared in violent circumstances in the artist’s native Colombia. In a similar way, but reversing the relationship with the reflected self, visitors to Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s Smoking Bench (2003), see themselves disappear in a cloud of fog that is released when they sit down on a small bench. French artist Laurent Grasso’s eye-catching video, Untitled (2003–05), creates a strange space in which an ominous cloud of fog traverses the streets of a seemingly deserted city and ultimately engulfs the camera itself. In American artist Jim Campbell’s Library (2004), bodies of passersby are turned into shadows that resemble ominous ghosts, set in relation to the monumentality of architecture. French artist Michel Delacroix’s sculptures reflect spectral images on the walls, which are blurred and distorted when the visitor approaches them. To denounce the problem of violent disappearance in Mexico, her own country, Teresa Margolles’ installation Aire (Air) (2002) uses a series of humidifiers that emit a thin column of fog produced by water mixed with miniscule parts of organic material obtained from the morgues of Mexico City and Ciudad Juarez; experiencing the piece implies imprinting the traces of the absent body in the body of the spectator, creating a different kind of specter detached from mere visual experience.

Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence is a traveling exhibition co-organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia, and circulated by iCI. The guest curator for the exhibition is José Roca. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by the iCI Exhibition Partners and the iCI independents.

This exhibition is made possible in part by a grant from the Horizons Grants Program of the Salina Arts & Humanities Commission, City of Salina.

For more information regarding Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence contact the Salina Art Center at 785 827 1431, or visit http://www.salinaartcenter.org. The Salina Art Center galleries are open Wednesday through Saturday from noon – 5:00 pm, and Sunday from 1:00 – 5:00 pm. Business office hours are Monday through Friday from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.