@ The Museum of Modern Art
Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality (MoMA)
I paid a visit to MoMA today and was really impressed by this small exhibition of Shigeko Kubota's work. Located in the new(ish) digital gallery on the 4th floor in the new West Wing at MoMA, the exhibition consisted of eight pieces of video sculpture. Five are installed in a brightly lit room, and three are installed in a dimly lit room.
The one that really caught my eye was a hanging spherical monitor - seriously, an orb! - that swayed back and forth like a pendulum. The screen was facing a curved mirrored surface that resembled a shorter and wider Pringle shape. As the pendulum swayed across the Pringle, the mirrored Pringle reflected a distorted shape that fled across its surface.
The title of the show 'Liquid Reality' appealed to me since I've been thinking about reality for another class (Performing Reality). I resonated with the artist's practice of distorting images (that are distortions in themselves) with rough or uneven reflective surfaces. I've spent a lot of time admiring and thinking about reflections in water and the way water is both opaque and translucent, depending on how the light hits it.
You can see the spherical orb here, and there doesn't seem to be any tricks about how it's crafted. It's quite simple, in order to celebrate the image as the art.