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Laila Pedro
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Imaging Sculpture: The Orginal Copy at MoMA
by Laila Pedro August 16, 2010
There are areas of the exhibition dedicated to giants of the form, notably Rodin and Brancusi. Curiously, these works seem to be more about explicitly celebrating sculptors than photographers. The photographs of Rodin’s work are astonishing. Though not taken by the sculptor himself they are carefully staged and controlled, framing the light hitting the bodies in a way that seem to breathe an uncanny whiff of life into the bronze figures. Counterintuitively, the mechanical process of photography seems to bring Rodin’s human figures closer to us, to humanize them through some uncanny visual alchemy.
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Who’s Bad? The Kitsch Pop Surrealism of David LaChapelle
by Laila Pedro July 20, 2010
Once we start down the path of visual referents though, everything becomes tangled—If Michael is the Son and the bird the Holy Spirit, where is the third part of the Trinity, the Father? Is LaChapelle just messing around? Picking references at random? Is the impact of the Sacred Heart and Michael’s figure enough that the image doesn’t need to formalize its symbolism any further? This last option is, I think, the most palatable, because it acknowledges the preeminence of the pop in his photography. The other symbols are used, referenced, and cast aside— while the real power comes from top 40 Radio, not the Old Masters
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Strange Fruit: Civil Rights and Visual Culture at ICP
by Laila Pedro June 30, 2010
Photos documenting suffering, lynchings, protests, and so on silently and powerfully condemn the abuses; they engage the viewer in an emotional response. In a parallel sense, other visual media can depict, intentionally or not, the same underlying social structures that create injustice. For this reason, this show’s juxtaposition of racist advertisements with direct photographic documentation of actual events effectively illustrates the complex network of imagery operating in the socio-visual history of the civil rights movement.
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Multiple Transgressions: Eichhorn and Bajevic at TEAM
by Laila Pedro June 24, 2010
The subject’s sex is again blurred out by the glimmering edge, so that even as the viewer’s power is refused, the object protects its autonomy, even, bizarrely and wonderfully, its privacy. In outsourcing the activity of authorship, to customs officials, no less, Eichorn reactivates the implications of this unconsummated desire. Mapplethorpe’s images become poignant, achieving, for a second time, a prescience of the looming AIDS epidemic.
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Night Fishing at Thierry Goldberg
by Laila Pedro May 26, 2010
This is intelligent, sensitive, multi-layered painting, and it follows itself to its logical conclusion: the painting literally comes out of its frame, tumbling from the severed lines of wood out onto the gallery floor. The use of abstraction leads the painting to the unknowable spaces, where it must, necessarily, transcend the fixed space of painting by literally falling from its frame
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What Matter’s Most at Exit Art
by Laila Pedro May 5, 2010
“Political” art, tends, for me, to violate an essential philosophical principle, eloquently articulated by the French literary theorist and poet Édouard Glissant: “dire, sans dire, tout en disant,” “to say, without saying, while saying.” That is to say, the best works of art are allusive rather than explicit; they suggest rather than indicating.
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