Review

Still from "Notebook #4", 5-Channel Video/Sound Installation

Andrea Flamini
Blind Files

10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Review Studios Exhibition Space
1708 Campbell
Kansas City, MO
816.994.7134

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday
Runs through: June 12

Artist's site: http://www.flamini.com
Gallery site: http://www.ereview.org

Walking out of the Review Studios Exhibition Space after seeing -- and hearing -- Andrea Flamini's Blind Files is a bit like waking up from a dream of great import and even greater mystery.

How else to explain Joseph Brodsky's half-heard poetry  ... the flickering visuals, resolving and dissolving ... the oddly erotic spectacle of bound wooden curves?

Flamini haunts at every turn and in every medium: video, black-and-white photography, painting and installation. Even the placement of two pieces -- ROMA (cello) and The Act of Watching, #2 (Vivre sa vie) -- is both strange and perfect. Neither is immediately visible upon entering the gallery. They're worth the search.

Flamini's descriptions of his pieces, under the heading of On subtracting, only add to the dreamlike feeling.

His note for Blind Files, a series of photographs taken from the book that gave this show its title:

On searching for the point of tension between an image and its breaking point. A space between the aesthetic image and a mental one. Between an idealized visual space of objects and events goverened by light, and a blind one governed by near-darkness. A darkened space where to anchor to better understand the visual, the mental and the physical space.

As with any particularly affecting dream, it would be best not to over-describe this one. To do so is to flirt with trivializing the experience, to focus on its improbable aspects ("There were these deer carcasses hanging ... and this sort of Man Ray thing going on ... and the screens were curved!") rather than on the lasting impressions it leaves.

Better to see this with your own eyes -- not rapidly moving behind shuttered lids, but wide open and lucid.

And don't forget to look in the corner ...

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