Second Hallwalls Visit, Jesse Webber and Kara Tanaka

I enjoyed my first Hallwalls visit very much, so I was looking forward to seeing the space's new shows by Jesse Webber and Kara Tanaka. Even the exhibition's names, "You can't smoke in here Mr. Corbusier, you'll burn this mother down" and Pining Wind respectively, caught my attention. Unfortunately, unlike the last two artists I saw there, Andrew Reyes and Rodney Taylor, neither of the current artists' works connected with me. Nothing currently located in the gallery particularly moved me, though I did appreciate the layout of the gallery space, and thought it worked with with the two shows by leading the visitor in a circle.

Jesse Webber's silk screens of the old grain silos just didn't do anything for me. I looked at the show's descriptions on the Hallwalls website before I visited, and even that didn't open up any of the works for me. And, with this show, if one of these works didn't move you, none of them would. I understood his desire to represent a world that had once been so promising, and had now fallen into such a state of disrepair, but I still didn't love any of the works. I did kind of like the large, rust sculpture that confronts you as soon as you enter the space, maybe because I felt more of the artist's presence in it. I also noticed that the neon orange "explosions" accompanying the photographs varied in intensity, but the pattern or reason behind it never made itself clear. Usually I like repetition and similar forms in artwork, but this time I was just unimpressed.

Following the gallery space around, I found myself in a smaller gallery space, with a strange object in the center of the room, and an even stranger one attached to the wall. I approached the central object first, and after a few tries, figured out how to watch the slideshow movie within this "satellite." Maybe I would have appreciated it more if I was familiar with the story behind it, but as it was, I thought it was too slow-paced and I got kind of bored pretty quickly. I liked Tanaka's general idea, thought the connection between the satellite and the images set in space was unique, but I just could not get into it.