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  • 4.0 star rating
    7/31/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    Very interesting gallery. Over the summer it featured a program called Films & Windows, where every few weeks it showed an artist's video(s) inside the gallery and another artist's sculptures or installation in the big vitrine that faces the sidewalk. I have been here a few times to check out what Mathew was showing as part of this program. The first time I went I really liked the window pieces, by Kerstin Braetsch (sp?), but I absolutely hated the video inside. It was an interview with an American woman, an artist apparently, who was talking about Berlin and how it had changed over the last decade. She was rehashing every possible cliche about gentrification, talking about how things were better when she was younger with zero self-awareness of her own role in the gentrification process. And she spoke with that dippy Californian intonation pattern that I can't stand listening to. So after about three minutes I went outside to look at the sculptures some more.

    When I returned the situation was reversed, in that I wasn't crazy about the window installation (by Taslima Ahmed, there were lots of pictures of cows, like in the tunnels of the trains you take to get around the Zurich airport) but I enjoyed the videos. They were made by the artist Ken Okiishi around the year 2000, when he was a student at Cooper Union in New York. They weren't amazing or anything but very good for undergraduate work, and gave an unpolished look not only at the New York cityscape of ten years ago but also the media environment (internet and movies) of the time. As I understood it, the theme of the Films & Windows series was gentrification, and it was approached in subtle ways. Showing this older work was one of them.  Using the storefront as a gallery space was another.  

    I should note that on my second trip to Mathew I talked to some people about the video I had seen on my previous visit and I learned that the Californian woman had in fact been an actress, reading a script that was deliberately written to sound extremely irritating. It fooled me!! I guess that makes it more interesting as an artwork but I still hate it.

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