Dario Robleto at Whitney's Altria Gallery
© Dan Strum
What do melted vinyl records, fragments
of the doomed
Challenger's
heat-shield and pulverized
bone have in common? It wouldn't appear to be much —
unless you've taken time to ponder
Diario Robleto's show at Whitney's Altria Gallery! Throughout
the show, Robleto uses these materials and more to convey
a sense of distilled
nostalgia
for the materials that pass through his hands.
The exhibit centers on ten plexiglass-enclosed sculptures,
collectively entitled
Popular Hymns
Will Sustain
Us All (End It All). The sculptures are compact,
boldly shaped, brightly colored, and have the appearance
of archeological relics
— fragile in form, and seemingly worn or corroded
with age. Melted-and-sculpted vinyl records are prominent
elements in each sculpture, and Robleto makes very deliberate
choices as to what music he uses to illustrate each
of his themes. The sculptures also incorporate
various minerals, an assortment of objects crafted
from plastic and rubber tubes, and selected modified
objects. The bottoms of the plexiglass cases flash to
the beat of (unheard) music. Robleto describes this
installation in the gallery notes as a musically-inspired
"sampling" of our world.
The individual sculptures within this installation differ
considerably. One of them, A Dark Day For The Dinosaurs,
uses a bone from the paw
of a prehistoric bear (purportedly
driven to extinction by humans), topped with a lighted lighter
made from the melted and sculpted rock records Life's
a Gas and Iron Man (by rock groups T-Rex and
Black Sabbath, respectively). The sculpture is tall, yellow,
and has a warm cartoon-like appearance. The lighted lighter,
being made out of records, immediately recalls
the gesture of an ardent
fan at a concert, cheering for yet one more song.
The juxtaposition
of ancient bones with the lighter made of music albums is
perplexing
— is the lighter being held by the extinct bear or is
the lighter a monument to its demise?
Perhaps the answer can be gleaned
from the group and song titles "T-Rex" and "Iron
Man"? Or, perhaps, given the fact that everything in
this installation has the appearance of being an ancient artifact,
Robleto is skirting
these questions entirely — the albums may have been
reduced to meaningless resin
after just another age
in a long line of ages.
A second installation in the gallery, entitled I Won't
Let You Say Goodbye This Time, consists of a series of
seven photographs of plants budding out of cotton-filled cups,
each cup bearing the name of the series and a person's name.
This work appears to be a sentimental monument, but it took
a reading of the gallery notes to piece the story together.
It turns turns out that the seeds were part of cargo that was launched
into space in 1984 and which was supposed to be retrieved
by the 1986 Challenger mission That Challenger mission exploded
disastrously on takeoff, and rather than be picked up, the
cargo was left floating in space for an additional four years
before arrangements could be made to retrieve it. The seeds
themselves had been sent into space as part of a high-school
science project. Once retrieved, Robleto managed to obtain
the seeds and fragments of the Challenger's shields for
use in his work.
Robleto used ceramics which incorporated dust from the heat-shields
to construct styrofoam-looking cups (in keeping with the seeds'
original class-science-project motif), and inscribed the name
of a deceased Challenger astronaut on each of the cups. He
then planted a seed in each of the cups and photographed the
new plant just as leaves were beginning to sprout In a very
real way these planted sculptures brought life to the lost
Challenger, and Robleto eternalized that life in his photographs.
The pictures in this series construe a very touching work,
not only as a memorial to the deceased astronauts, but as
a scientific tribute to the great goals of their mission.
Yet another corner of the gallery contains a pair of related
works — Nowadays I Only Look Up to Pray and
If A Meteorite Falls On Your Head Then God Was Aiming.
The first work consists of a custom-built kaleidoscope crafted
from, among other things, the glass that formed in the desert
as the result of the first tests of a nuclear explosion. This
kaleidoscope looks down on the second work, which consists
of marbles made of the glass that formed when a meteor struck
the earth lying within a playful swirl of pulverized bone
and fossils. The charm of looking through the beautiful kaleidoscope
and the warmly colored marbles beneath belie the idea of such
cataclysmic explosions that went into making the materials
that were used, and the elegant paths traced through the bone
dust belie the import of the destruction, death and extinction
that such impacts imply.
There is more to the exhibit, including his fascinating Men
are the New Women, composed of the dust from a pulverized
woman's rib refashioned as a man's rib, a drumstick fashioned
of nuclear-explosion created glass, in tribute to the legendary
rock 'n roll drummer Keith Moon, and a series of conceptually
curious digital prints.
Throughout his work, Robleto demonstrates great visual elegance,
and the careful viewer can't help but be impressed by the
incredible conceptual gravity he invests into his work through
the materials he uses! Still, it seems to this reviewer
that the intensity that makes the work so intriguing also
makes it difficult to grasp The viewer has to make a substantial
effort to consider obscure songs, interpret arcane materials
and decipher subtle contextual references. I walked away from
the exhibit touched by what I understood, but also rather
perplexed; would I have liked the show better if I had known
more of the songs?
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