ARTISTS
KEN FANDELL
SELECTED PRESS
Art review: Ken Fandell at Tony Wight Gallery, Time Out Chicago, 2008
Ken Fandell uses Google and Flash to examine the human tendency to react to scientific discoveries with both awe and anxiety. In the show’s centerpiece—the ten-minute animation loop The Most Important Picture Ever —the artist juxtaposes a 2004 image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope with his own photograph of an orange lump. Thanks to Flash, Fandell transitions between jewel-like nascent galaxies circa 14 billion years ago and his vile-looking subject. Each picture morphs into the other and back again, set to a trippy, slowed-down version of the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” As each image crystallizes from abstract fields of sliding brown and yellow streaks, a drum riff kicks in.
The artist found the Hubble image through a Google search for “the most important picture”; he photographed the lump during a classroom lecture about determining a picture’s significance by context. These methods intriguingly contrast the aggregate knowledge compiled on the Internet with individual bias. Fandell’s title and content indicate that he’s asking the viewer, Which picture is more important: the sublime cosmos or the everyday? Yet he undermines his point by choosing the lump image, which has little value even to him, and straining to extend his question to the art world’s standards.
Fandell’s photographs articulate his own struggle with scientific revelations more successfully. Part I, a slightly askew double-layered image of the Hubble photograph, expresses the artist’s nervous reaction to the possibility of multiple universes. It, too, suggests that “importance” is arbitrary, but the piece is also unapologetically beautiful.
Jonathan Kinkley