Nicolas Floc’h: Epicerie and the Portable Store
Ivy Crest Garden
at NFA Space, through October 3
Again and again I’ve been confronted as a critic with ill-conceived or poorly executed presentations that undermine the art being shown. Especially when it comes to conceptual work, where there isn’t all that much to look at sometimes, many artists don’t seem to realize the importance of the details of design and display.
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Bringing nature into a gallery both challenges traditional definitions of art and makes an ecological point about the way human constructions divide and delimit space. Even a tiny plant makes us aware of its potential for growth and thereby invokes the whole world of blossoming nature. And by placing his plants in a carefully constructed store–everything here is for sale–Floc’h challenges the standard model of art collecting: there are no unique or precious objects here. This show has also created a dialogue with members of the community where the gallery is located: people see the plants in the window and come in and learn about the project, sometimes buying something.
Things get a lot sloppier in Floc’h’s presentations at I Space. A short slide show documents his “Ecriture Productive,” a project in which seeds were sown in patterns to spell out the plants’ names. We see greenery from above arranged to spell the French word for “radish,” followed by slides of people eating radishes; this juxtaposition is repeated for other plantings. After decades of French-based semiology and deconstruction, there’s something appealing about a Frenchman who grows plants in the shapes of their names, but the idea isn’t exactly profound.
With an installation by Columbus, Ohio, resident Kenneth E. Rinaldo, “Flickering Signifiers,” Gallery E.G.G. rather than the artist has failed in its presentation. Each of Rinaldo’s five video sculptures consists of a small television stripped of its case and enclosed in a bubble of blown glass, revealing the whole mechanism. Just outside the glass a concave piece of painted plaster is mounted flush with the screen so it’s almost impossible to see what’s on it. What you’re supposed to look at is the reflected light, a diffuse blur. The idea is to make visible the weird, almost diseased quality of light from a cathode-ray tube: Rinaldo includes in his statement a quote from philosopher Paul Viriglio, who calls television an “infection.” And Rinaldo’s modified TVs elegantly negate the way television’s pleasurable images seduce and their flickering light hypnotizes.
