Rewind: Christian Kuras
Christian Kuras's recent exhibition offers no easy answers. Consisting of digital photography, drawing and an installation, the exhibition showcases Kuras's brainy, cross-disciplinary endeavours in a display that both pleases and challenges in one fell swoop. The show pivots on an installation called Drone: a series of identical megaphones hung in a circle from the ceiling. Each shiny mouthpiece is poised at the back end of the next, creating an unbroken and frustratingly mute circle. Each megaphone hints at an entry point: speaking into any one would, hypothetically, set off a chain reaction involving the rest. Some viewers have commented that they wish it would make sound—that the megaphone would step up to its inherent function. That it remains mute allows the work to become something else: a study of concept and composition that contemplates both a seemingly closed system and infinitely permeable limits.
4 Time is a digital photograph with a similarly loaded sense of disappointment. It depicts a digitally altered turntable with four playing arms. Like the megaphones, the image refers to a real-world potential (for sound, confusion and ruining a perfectly good song) but stops short of manifesting it. The image undermines the musical order (4/4 is common time) implied by the work's title. A song played from four different starting points presents a philosophical conundrum in which meaning starts to spiral, fractal-like, in the mind of the viewer.
Kuras's works read at first like jokes but their indeterminate, unsatisfying punchlines hint at more complex motivations. They involve two symbols often associated with young people and aggression—the party and the protest— and infuse them with a contemplative air. Kuras resists positing beginnings or ends for his circular creations. Instead, he offers high-art brainteasers. In a world of easy answers, his works are refreshing. In making room for possibility and complexity, Kuras comes to no conclusions, and that seems to be the point. Fall 2005
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