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Double-Take: The Poetics of Illusion and Light
Bernhard Hildebrandt, This Is Not Kosuth, 2007
Alexandra A. Grant
Bernhard Hildebrandt
Mary Temple
December 20, 2007 – May 11, 2008
With painting, photography, video, and sculpture, the artists in Double-Take create images and environments that challenge perception, often creating works that harness the evocative potential of light and shadow. Visual slights of hand, the provocative doubling of meanings and images, and a poetic and refined aesthetic unites the artists in Double-Take creating a dialogue of seductive and richly-layered works.
Alexandra Grant
Images and meanings double in the works of Baltimore-based artist Bernhard Hildebrandt who skillfully merges and manipulates illusion and reality through works in painting, photography, video, and neon word sculpture. In his ongoing stereo series, for example, Hildebrandt creates highly reflective monochrome paintings in white or black. These elegant minimal paintings are then hung side-by-side a full-size photograph of the painting--a digital twin that captures the reflected light and shadows of interior details in the painting. These provocative pairings present an engaging and layered play with perception while exploring the relationship between the original object and its representation. Visual illusion merges with architecture in the large site-specific installations by Brooklyn-based Mary Temple whose faint trompe l’oeil paintings of shadows on gallery walls and floors give the appearance of sunlight streaming through a window. Although her chosen gallery spaces have no corresponding windows, and in many cases no windows at all, Temple’s shadowy painted outlines of windowpanes, tree branches, and bushes trick the eye as they appear to animate walls and floors with the movement of light. The illusionist qualities of light and shadow are also central to Los Angeles-based Alexandra A. Grant’s installation entitled nimbusII (after Michael Joyce's "nimbus,") 2003. This work, a “drawing without paper”, is a sculpture in twisted wire filigree that hangs from the ceiling like an ephemeral cloud. Grant has shaped the wire to create an infinite line drawing with embedded passages of text that when hung from the ceiling casts a delicate shadowy double of these words on the gallery walls.
Mary Temple, Southwest Corner, Northeast Light, 2007
Read the Washington Post's review of Double-Take.
The Contemporary Museum gratefully acknowledges the lead sponsors of Double-Take, Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff.
Major support provided by the Durfee Foundation, Honor Fraser, Virginia Adams and Neal Friedlander, Laura L. Freelander, Bodil Ottesen, Joanne Gold and Andrew Stern, Ilene and Michael Salcman, and an anonymous donor.
Additional support provided by Janet Heller, Jonna and Fred Lazarus, Hugh P. McCormick III, Thomas H. Powell, and John W. and Jane Campe Payne.
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