white stucco wall and sliding door with yellow scaffolding

Result #1

white stucco wall and sliding door with yellow scaffolding. The rooms color scheme, with a few white-on-blue works, seemed to embody the sense of the title.On the eighth floor, a two-channel video installation, beginning with a similar, albeit more muted, set of images, recast the neon-lit interior of the gallery as a human-sized, robotlike creature. The two-channel piece was produced in software and showcased at the Whitney Biennial last year. Burdened with a digital input lag, the video was shot with a Canon EOS 70D, to which it was fed from the computer. With this new digital imaging technology, the video was projected onto two screens, one of which was mounted in front of the mirrored wall and the other in a room adjoining the camera. The mirrored wall was used as a lens, which operated on the same principle as the film itself, focusing the viewers image on the viewer. In the video, the sky is darkened by the lighting of the lighting panels, which are illuminating an indeterminate, darkened background. The distance between the cameras lens and the backing wall is also a result of lighting, resulting in a flickering, essentially three-dimensional, effect. Although the ambient light in the mirror, which only dims, is reflected off the mirrored wall, the resulting flash of red light on the mirrored wall is visible, however momentarily, on the back wall. A single-frame sequence, also in this vein, is shown on the mirrored wall. Again, the video is projected onto two screens, one of which is mirrored and one of which has a built-in camera. Here the same principle is used to create a two-dimensional illusion. The reflected image, on the mirror surface, is not only part of the image but is also the source of the image. The image is revealed as a three-dimensional projection that duplicates the illusion of reality that the mirrored wall makes on the mirrored wall.

Result #2

white stucco wall and sliding door with yellow scaffolding as the way to enter the building. This string of contrapuntal elements effectively constructs a room, concealing the intermingling of a collection of discretely different scenes. The installation also reveals the potential of materiality. The time- and material-neutral structure of the building, which is made up of two narrow, open spaces, evokes both space and time, and functions like a bridge between the interior and the exterior world. The passage between spaces is conceptualized as two modes of seeing, one visual and one abstract, but one based on tension and harmony. This tension is apparent even in the color and texture of the building. Each piece of gray concrete contains a rich, granular and humidively saturated hue, which does not simply capture the air but also creates a thermal and luminous presence. For example, one of the vivid and vibrant colors that fills the building at night is violet; in the middle of the gray concrete are black and blue smears. The dense, vibrant colors of a dark-blue window frame generate a thickly defined surface and a diffuse and slightly translucent light field. The atmosphere of the building is seared, imbued with a sense of heat and radiation.As in many of Raets pieces, the final work, the green-blue unit is a metaphor for an original and not a translation, one that is not based on either science or technology but is founded on intuition. The building, which is part of the same physical space as a body, reveals that the building can be considered both an architectural model and a material body, that it can be treated and manipulated according to its form and function. In the architectonic structure of Raets work, material is both a kind of regulative principle and a metaphoric one, and that the material properties and uses of the building are merely perceptual manifestations of its physical form.

Result #3

white stucco wall and sliding door with yellow scaffolding. On the upper floor, a large picture, four red and two blue canvases, was installed on the wall. Three were also on display in the gallery. Despite its regularity, the installation was quite different from the preceding one-gallery installations of these artists. Here, painting and its art-historical antecedents were presented with a freer hand, as if the works could be repeated and reproduced without any limitations or restrictions. The gesture of copying was replaced by the exploration of the sources of the reproduction process, especially of the photographic image. The medium and its affective consequences were invoked, and the mediums history was discussed. Later on, a portrait, a miniature, and a charcoal drawing of the artist were installed on the floor.At first glance, however, this exhibition might have seemed to have been an exercise in ambiguous juxtaposition: the painterly and photo-documentary works on display were not in harmony with each other. But behind all differences was a kind of relationship that was meaningful and intimate, corresponding to a genuine intimacy between viewer and artist. What initially seemed strange, profound, or merely humorous, seemed at first to be genuine. It was as if we were left with an authentic image, and the only thing remaining on the table was the question of how the image was reproduced, how it was created, and how we can comprehend it. The viewer could spend a few minutes with the photo-image, which would then be put on display, where it would serve as the subject of a new work. However, the paintings on display were actually the result of a creative process. In fact, the work on view was the result of a relationship with and through photography, that is, with photography, both as a medium and as a study of the creative process. It was not only an invitation to look through the artist-photographer-marker-s-door, but also to begin to understand how the photographic process is made.

Result #4

white stucco wall and sliding door with yellow scaffolding. Built in 1930, the most significant of Rama churches, it dates from the late 15th century and was rerenovated after World War II. Despite the importance of this long-lost church, he wrote in the present collection, the structure is neglected, and the authorities usually only return visitors to view a work by one of the architects, Joseph Beuys. His admirable work at the Burj Khalifa, a structure the curator Amy Werner puts on view in the museum, signals Rama as a transformative genius, or as a Christian who became a Muslim during his lifetime.On first reading, Rama may be too easy-minded to evoke this legacy. After all, the tradition of religious and political ambition in the Arab world is still in effect, and much of the significance of the Arabs current secularism and democracy can be traced back to Rama. But this interpretation of the Rama architecture, which posits that the church built in Makran for Mufidis Sukhna mosque in Damascus in the 10th century is the most important building in the whole region, is contradicted by the curators ambition to remember as much as possible. In keeping with their belief in the power of history, they hope to remember as many as possible, but they acknowledge that, in the end, the past is a consequence of the present, and that in the end, the present is the same as the past. The history of the Middle East is a collective memory, and the exhibition and installation in the museum are integral parts of that collective memory, which they hope to liberate from all the historical baggage that the exhibition can carry. Meanwhile, in the East, history is a thing of this moment, a phenomenon which possesses no individual name or any recognizable unit, as Beuys would have it, only vague outlines.