art january in london

Despite the looming presence of the long nights and credit crunch in January London, the art scene is trying its best to lift people's spirits up. Museums and galleries are still offering a shelter for the people in the city to escape from the bloodbath in the job market and continuous media bombing of economic news (which becomes basically the same piece of news everyday replacing just the name of the company that went bankrupt or the figure of loss the company made).

Tierney Gearon, an american former-model-turned-photographer, had her solo show Explosure at Phillips de Pury Gallery in Victoria.

tierney gearon . explosure

Her photos capture the magic of double exposure, and one would wonder how she made these overlapping images so perfectly without any post-production. But even if these double exposure are arranged at post-production, the persistent appearance of her children featured in many of her works displayed juxtaposing with everyday scenes provide a distorted sense/scale of time and space, as well as a level of surrealism over the exhibition even the medium used and locations shot are no other than ordinary.

tierney gearon . explosure
exhibition photo set here

At Tate ModernDominique Gonzalez-foerster is the artist responsible for the turbine hall now. Unlike previous artists that create a centre-piece of their own in the mega-space, she performs like a curator to present a selection of other people's works in an environment she creates to deliver her message/concept (refer to the video interview in the Futher Reading link below). This is what makes it interesting or at least makes the point for this installation, called TH.2058.

dominique gonzalez-foerster . TH.2058

Personally I prefer the previous approach as given the scale of the space reserved for only one artist, visitors are expected to see a single piece of work inside. However, such '3D-collage' approach is nothing fundmentally different from a 2D collage picture created by many other famous artists in the past generations. Perhaps we could all learn to appreciate art in a fresh perspective. In this aspect I think Tate Modern has really stood up to its vision and curatorship to be a frontier in contemporary art. Let's see what the next Turbine Hall work would be...

dominique gonzalez-foerster . TH.2058
insallation photo set here

Further reading -
Tierney Gearon in wikipedia
Telegraph magazine covers Tierney Gearon's Explosure
Official page for TH.2058 at Tate Modern
Reviews of TH.2058 at www.culturecritic.co.uk
Interview clip of Dominique Gonzalez-foerster on TH.2058 by the Guardian UK