Metamorphoses: Error

METAMORPHOSES: ERROR features three artists who explore ideas of transformation, reincarnation, and constant change. The works all present transitions of one thing into another, as well as shifts of a greater scale. The show explores strategies of making, making do, messing with, reconfiguring and retaining.
Like a biological mutant, a forgotten mythology or a bugged program, the works always represent some sort of failure: an error in re-formatting. These ‘shifts in plans’ are reflected in both the images and the processes,  the results often both pathetic and magical.
Vlatka Horvat’s Anatomies depicts a set of disembodied limbs in dance-like arrangements with their own mirror image. In this series of seemingly endless permutations and variations, the body is distorted into abstract symbols and ornaments, removed from reference to the real. These forms are re-imagined as new bodies forms that evoke Borgesian Imaginary Creatures: bodies that are all limbs. In the series Anatomies and Arrangements the body is presented at the brink of abstraction – at once familiar and strange, recognizable and grotesque. Horvat’s forms are revealed as a set of possibilities, as potentials for movement and reorganization. In Repurposed, Horvat presents a series of playful proposals that re-imagine the space of Forum Stadtpark gallery as a site with a myriad of uses. The proposed interventions and alterations range from practical and plausible to ridiculous, mischievous, troubling, and utterly inappropriate, including turning the gallery into a hospital, refugee camp, wrestling arena, and farm, among others.
Utilizing digital and traditional photographic processes, Tamar Halpern explores, amplifies, and disrupts the legacies of modernist abstraction. Juxtaposing computer-generated and digitally modified imagery, Halpern first creates digital prints, which she subsequently re-photographs and prints as large-scale chromira prints. Through the accumulation of these layered processes, Halpern’s works seem to both negate and elude to ‘simple’ aesthetic assimilation. The resultant images seem  suspended in a state of flux. Halpern’s process is an on-going, rapid metabolism of capturing and processing, shaping and fracturing. Through  strong affiliation with modernist abstraction, Halpren presents her own version of photo-based gesture when she employs an additional physical layer in her process. Subjecting the print to  chemical intervention, she proceeds to rub the finished print with paint, smearing and affecting the surface of the colored paper. Ultimately, Halpern’s photo-based works resist attempts at categorization. They are at once captivating and chaotic.
Ofri Cnaani presents a series of a portable, low-tech moviemakers made of overhead projectors and rotating Plexiglas disks. The moviemakers churn out short movies (24 frames per minute) by placing various 2 or 3D objects on a transparent disk, allowing their various physical qualities to cast images on the adjacent wall. The outcome is a low-capacity-visual-memory machine, which cannot record more than one minute, but that loops infinitely until the objects on the disk are moved. Unlike a cinematic experience, this sculptural configuration makes no attempt to hide its means of production. The equal attention to projector and image seeks to explore the tension between reality and illusion. The works lie between the traditions of nomadic-circuses and today’s DIY media-space. Cnaani works with film celluloid, spray paint silhouettes, paper cut-outs, and broken glass and mirrors. Technological failures are artificially encouraged to create all sorts of magic and tricks. The brief and often whimsical movies toy with the nature of perception, exposing blind spots and challenging preconception about visual entertainment. Cnaani also presents a series of ceramic plates, crafted as part of an on-going project focused on dismantling an pseudo-repair.