The "big questions" in life are so well worn and hopelessly elusive that art sometimes avoids them altogether. Our Origins is an evocative collection of photography and multimedia artwork currently on exhibit in Columbia's Museum of Contemporary Photography which faces these questions head on: who are we, where did we come from, where are we going and how do we wrap our heads around the brevity and miniature scale of our lives in relation to the universe?Its entrance located on the first floor of the 600 South Michigan building, the Museum of Contemporary Photography is a traditionally sparse, white exhibition space spanning three floors. The organizers of Our Origins, however, have made deceptively creative use of the space, allowing the viewer to descend through time while ascending through the gallery.
Much of the first floor is concerned the man's primal origins: from Alison Ruttan's vulgar and mesmerizing portraits of modern day humans acting out the behavior of Jane Goodall's apes to
Jennifer Ray's lush and sensual photos of scenic natural beauty juxtaposed with used condoms, Viagra and the debris of modern sexual life. The monochrome landscapes of Mark Ruwedal's photos evoke both the ancient past and the apocalyptic future.Our Origins' second floor shifts to the pre-human, with a series of photos by Rachel Sussman of some of the world's oldest plants. The concept is rich - it's incredible to see trees, coral formations and bacteria which have been on the Earth since before civilization, before mankind - and the photos are beautiful, but they are more scientific curiosity than artwork and seem somewhat inappropriate for a gallery setting.
Things turn cosmic on the exhibition's third floor. One is first greeted by a huge and stunning video installation above the staircase, artist team SEMICONDUCTOR's Black Rain. Composed of several minutes of unprocessed NASA footage from satellites rotating the sun and a hum of ambient noise, the experience is one of the most powerful the exhibition has to offer. A moving pattern of stars and grainy bursts of light emanating from the sun, the scratchy digital artifacts of the video are intended to mark the boundary maintained by technology between us and the infinite, but there is something purer and more powerful about Black Rain than the spotlessness of official NASA images.
The other works found on the third floor range from Julia Büttelmann's whimsical but overly novel cardboard microscope kit to Jason Lazarus's starkly powerful, monochrome portrait of astrophysicist Eric Becklin. Though tucked away on the first floor, Ken Fandell's The Most Important Picture Ever fits snugly with the cosmic theme - it's an animated video installation which slowly abstracts a Hubble Telescope photo of thousands of galaxies into the colorful smears of an impressionist painting.
More analytical and scientifically contemplative than the typical art exhibition, Our Origins (running till October 16) may appeal best to those usually perplexed by more ambiguous artwork. This is not to sell it short though - it's a relaxing and thought provoking collection and well worth anyone's limited earthly time.
Man, that's a good review. You're an outstanding prose stylist, have been all along, but here you're really getting all the elements of the review content in balance. In particular I admire your mastery of the one-sentence synopsis/evaluation, like "The monochrome landscapes of Mark Ruwedal's photos evoke both the ancient past and the apocalyptic future." Very con/precise! The integration of a/v here just gilds the lilly. Great work!
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