The Albuquerque Journal - Ripples For Relection
RIPPLES FOR REFLECTION – WATER ARTIST SHOWS TWO EXHIBITIONS
By Harmony Hammond
The Albuquerque Journal-North – May 14, 2010
The Center for Contemporary Art
The Muñoz Waxman Gallery space at the Center for Contemporary Arts is one of the best exhibition spaces in town. A large warehouse-type space, it demands strong art. Most work gets lost. Eric Tillinghast’s ambitious site-specific installation “Rain Machine” is the first exhibition, solo or group, to fully engage the space. It’s fabulous: Tillinghast at his best.
Working both two-and-three-dimensionally for over a decade, Tillinghast has focused on water as his primary subject and medium. “Rain Machine” consists of continuous fast drips from a black pipe grid on the ceiling, falling 25 feet into a shallow rectangular black tray filled with water, creating a grid of raindrops on the surface. Each raindrop ripples out to meet the next, generating small waves that overlap, occasionally breaking the surface tension with mall splashes and splatters. I think of Eva Hesse’s delicate grid-based drawings concentric circles.
The tray of rain water fills the cavernous room but leaves space to walk around the perimeter. One can look up at the exposed ceiling apparatus and watch the induced drops fall, but the magic of the piece is below on the water’s surface – a “horizontal plane of rippling points” sparkling in the sun. It is mesmerizing and rejuvenating. I want to sit on a bench, listen to the rapid succession of drops hitting the water and meditate – let my thoughts go where they will, as we do when staring into bodies of water. A space of “reflection.”I think of the difference between water (real and symbolic life fluid) “once perceived as the stuff which radiates purity” and H_O, “the new stuff on whose purification human survival now depends.” (See Ivan Illich’s “H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness”).
I think of “Frustrum,” Gary Hill’s 2007 video installation at the Foundation Cartier of Contemporary Art in Paris, consisting of a low rectangular room-sized pool of black oil with a gold bar in the center and a giant virtual eagle caught in power lines flapping its wings projected floor to ceiling on the wall behind one end. The eagle is reflected on the surface of the oil. As the tips of its wings appear to dip into the oil, it sends ripples across the surface of the dark pool. No, “Rain Machine” is not an overtly political piece like “Frustrum.” It is quietly political. Given the subject and poetics of water, politics and environmental issues hover in the background and lurk around the edges. Viewers bring it with them. Especially here in New Mexico where there is no water. We need this kind of (re)generative art as well as the overtly political.
Launch Projects
The CCA exhibition is in conjunction with “Water,” Tillinghast’s solo exhibition at LaunchProjects. The show presents paintings, photographs and sculptures based on the concept of normally fluid and formless water waking shape as puddles, pools, and lakes. The two object-based sculptures of water puddles on steel bases and the maquette for “Two Tanks,” a large metal and water sculpture currently included in “Art on the Edge” at the New Mexico Museum of Art, are interesting, but it’s the small works on paper that are most engaging. Tillinghast photographs or finds photographs of bodies of water on the Internet, then digitally removes the surrounding environment – leaving the shape of the body of water as it conformed to natural or man-made boundaries, or what he calls “containers.”
The three “Puddle” prints are based on photos Tillinghast took. Because of watercolor-like gradations of blue, the shapes derived from the puddles read both flat and spatial. In “Pools,” Tillinghast reworked appropriated photographs of swimming pools. From a distance, the resulting condensed-down shapes – both familiar and strange – read solid turquoise. It’s only upon very close examination, that variation in water depth, reflection of light on the surface, and the side of or steps into the pool are discernable.
While the painted water shapes in the series “The Deepest Lakes in the World,” are created in the same subtractive manner, they have a different material presence because they are acrylic paintings rather than digital prints. Based on images of lakes as seen from above (captured by Google Earth), each lake is represented by a crisp-edged eccentric shape, filled in flat, solid and opaque with acrylic paint in different hues of blue and green. What looks like land masses, islands floating in a sea of white, are in actuality water with land taken away – a contemporary play on positive-negative space with political overtones. I recommend seeing both exhibitions.
