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ARTnews
Three Seattle Reviews GREGORY KUCERA Greg Kucera, Seattle by Richard Speer (Unedited plain-text version) An aspiring king of all media, Gregory Kucera (no relation to the gallerist) displays virtuosity with sculpture, photography, video installation, and digital prints in his ambitious, tightly thematic first showing at the gallery. The Los Angeles artist makes short films and digitally averages their imagery into horizontal bands of color, then prints and seals the resulting captures in Plexiglas sheets. The effect recalls Tim Bavington’s rock-and-roll-inspired stripe paintings, but with a more marked juxtaposition of hard line and airbrush-like gradation. Kucera’s sculpture, Temporal Relief, is a negative-space inversion of an L.A. city block used in another video installation. It’s an agreeably odd piece fashioned from white polyurethane and resin. Looking for all the world like a giant petrified marshmallow, it protrudes pointily here and there, its architectural details tiny stalactites of white goo frozen mid-melt. The artist’s perforated cast acrylics have holes bored through their surfaces, such that from afar, the holes pixelate into a tableau of chair and end table. In turn, this furniture makes another appearance in the show’s pièce de résistance, a video installation called Tina: Spatiotemporal Reconstruction 2. The chair and table are configured in the same spot in four different living rooms, with a blandly dressed woman walking into each room, sitting down, and arguing with a lover over the phone. After intersplicing these scenarios at a leisurely pace, Kucera ratchets up the editing to dizzying speeds, making for a disorienting yet strangely comforting scene. No matter our environment, the artist seems to posit, we—and our banalities—remain the same. —Richard Speer |
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