Huffington Post Arts

From Huffington Post Arts:

Haiku Reviews: From Vivaldi To Vivid Pop Art (PHOTOS)

First posted: 01/06/2012

HuffPost Arts’ Haiku Reviews are biweekly features where we invite critics to review exhibitions and performances in short form. Some will be in the traditional Haiku form of 5x7x5 syllables, others might be a sonnet or even a string of words. This week Peter Frank and Laurence Vittes give quick takes on visual arts, theatre and classical music from ‘invisible artwork’ to the Los Angeles avant garde. Is there a show or performance that you think people should know about? Write a Haiku with a link and shine a light on something you think is noteworthy. We’d love to hear about it!

Barbara Kasten figured importantly in the “photographic revolution” of 1970s California, contributing specifically, and majestically, to the formal experimentation that characterized so much of the work from this era. Light was (and remains) not simply Kasten’s medium, but her preoccupation, and she played with the effects of light on semi-reflective surfaces, its transformation through lenses and refracting structures, and the simultaneous fluidity and fixity it can evince when run through elaborate series of geometric baffles. This small, tantalizing Pacific Standard Time-adjacent survey includes Kasten’s mid-’70s “photogenic paintings,” with their ripples and shadows and granular fields; the “amalgams” that followed, collapsing space as light composes what seems solid, even cubic, one moment, ephemeral the next; the early-80s “constructs,” elaborate interplays of form and color (that, in their geometric language, conjure the Bauhaus); and a few works from the past year, continuing and conflating all these inquiries. (Luisotti, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave. #A2, S. Monica; thru Jan. 7. www.galleryluisotti.com)

– Peter Frank


BARBARA KASTEN, Construct PC-IX, 1982, Polaroid Polacolor print, 24 x 20 inches