Review

A review of Museum Interrupted • Rachel Hayes, Anne Lindberg, Miles Neidinger

Rachel Hayes, installation view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas, of "All Most All Ways," light gels and fabric, 2010; courtesy of artist and the Dolphin Gallery. Image: Michael Spillers photo, courtesy of the museum

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
Johnson County Community College
Overland Park, Kansas
October 29, 2010 — February 13, 2011

The exhibition Museum Interrupted offers three Kansas City artists, Rachel Hayes, Anne Lindberg, and Miles Neidinger, the opportunity to let a particular space incubate a new work. All three use physical materials and patterns in their interrupting — no traditional auditory interruptions here. These interruptions happen silently and rather politely.

Rachel Hayes uses the largest, most open space. She has hung two sails: one black, one white. Each sheet has panels of translucent color. The neat “v” in which they are hung allows the viewer to walk under each side, between the fabric sheet and the wall, and see the dyed light hitting the wall. The black side is soberly iron-like, the white side is circus modernus. Combined are ideas of sailboats, Tiffany glass, and 1960s churches. Sailboats, circuses and, tents move, while stained glass is among the more fixed and brittle arts. As a temporary exhibition, literally interrupting the museum, it plays with mobility. Hayes has entitled the piece All Most All Ways, which further suggests a sense of flexibility and ambiguity, although the work is bold. The gray-scale tones show how differently colors can be framed, echoing the painter Warren Isensee’s explanation of changes in the way colors are produced, included downstairs alongside his work in another exhibition (Ecstatic Structure). Our sense of color used to begin with white, when most 2D color was printed, but today most of our color is on electronic screens, and it begins with black. Isensee’s efforts to create a “glow” with paint on white canvas show that the color that comes through a material, carried by light, and hits a white wall beyond, is neither printed or glowing, but another animal yet.

Anne Lindberg installing "raume yellow," Egyptian cotton and staples, 2010, at at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. Image: courtesy of the artist and museum

Everyone flocks to Anne Lindberg’s raume yellow, even though it’s nothing more than thread, staples, and o-hooks. It’s the warp-speed zing of a myriad of strands, so many that focus is impossible. Looking at it is like trying to see hurricane rain through a strobe light. The effect is that the thread seems to be yellow, fading to white. The very notion of color is hard to process from looking at this bathroom-sized static pattern. However many strands were strung into the wall, it’s more threads than your brain can absorb. This deficiency seems odd because modern times are supposed to overwhelm us with data, give us too many voices, too many choices — yet this work shows how simple repetition of simple material is enough to send our vision trembling ecstatically. It is more Apollonian than Dionysian, though; if the overload of the Internet is Dionysus, wild and thirsty, raume yellow is hot, clear Apollonian energy.

Miles Neidinger’s Everything we see is not enough looks conglomerate, a mélange of slick and straw-textured materials hanging from three ceiling hooks. The colors battle, cools and red-hots, and the sharp edges of the strands sticking out argue with the sloping hammock shape. The sagging is as pessimistic as the title, as the stray pieces that won’t quite unite with the rest of the form. As the title suggests, the structure lacks a sense of completion. Perhaps less variety in materials would have created greater tension in Everything we see is not enough, but as it stands, the slump of its shape is its strongest statement.

Miles Neidinger, installation view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas, of "Everything we see is never enough," twist ties, vinyl tape, yarn and assorted drinking straws, 2010; courtesy of the artist. Image: Michael Spillers, photo, courtesy of the museum

The interactive nature of Hayes’s and Lindberg’s pieces definitely interrupt. Hayes’s requires the viewer to walk under and through created spaces, and Lindberg’s places especially unusual, disorienting demands on the eyes. The size of her chosen space, its claustrophobia, focuses the viewer on her buzzing vision. The space around Neidinger’s piece is used more as a frame than challenge, and interrupts the space with more of a slash than a punch.

-re-

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