Tag: playtime-peabody-essex

The Yoda Project: An Interview: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

My name is Gwen Smith. I am an artist, I am a mother, I am a seeker, I am a finder, and I’m a player.

The Yoda series is a collection of images which shows the character Yoda as well as the lifespan of our child, River. My partner, Haim Steinbach, has used the Yoda character since the early ‘80s as an avatar for himself. So when people asked him for portraits he often would wear the Yoda mask. Many people still don’t know what he looks like.

We started a postcard / Christmas card project, and the first one was a picture of our cat, Hector, and he had caught a mouse. I remember sending it to my grandmother and my grandmother was like, This is the strangest Christmas card I’ve ever gotten in my life. And I said, well, you know, hang on, it’s going to get weirder!

So subsequently, each year around November, the Yoda mask comes out. River gets a year older and the series continues.

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Trevor Smith on Teppei Kaneuji: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

There’s two sorts of artists: those that begin with a clear vision of the desired outcome, then there are those like Teppei Kaneuji that play with what’s in front of them, building structures and surface in a more improvisational way. It’s kind of like jazz.

White Discharge is a great example of this. It’s made out of many objects that he probably sourced at a big box store. Brightly colored plastic objects are piled high on a backyard barbecue. Their contrasting colors are visually unified by a pour of white, plaster-like material.

It’s as if he’s using these functional objects to create a landscape for my imagination—kind of like a post-consumer’s version of a Chinese scholar’s rock. I can project myself into it as if it’s a real landscape and imagine playing on its ramps and exploring its crevasses. It’s a meditation on our culture of overproduction and overconsumption.

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Trevor Smith on Roman Signer: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

Roman Signer applies the forces of nature to everyday objects in highly unusual ways. Each of his works begins with him asking himself, what would happen if . . . ? What would happen if I drove a kayak down the middle of a country road? What would happen if I took my work truck and ran it down a ramp as if it were a toy?

Every day, in moments of quiet reflection, I sit down in my office chair and slowly spin myself around. Roman Signer sits down, asks what if? and spins himself around using rockets. He takes a small, ordinary action and makes it extraordinary, even cosmic.

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Trevor Smith on Robin Rhode: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

When we look at a picture, we can’t help but project ourselves into it. It doesn’t have to be highly realistic to have this effect on us. Robin Rhode, I think, is a great example of this phenomena.

He makes photographic series and videos in which he interacts with a drawing that he makes. The drawings are very simple. They’re the kind of drawings you might see on a wall as graffiti or a chalk drawing on pavement.

He uses this drawing to imagine himself performing feats of virtuosity, making the kinds of balletic slam dunks of a basketball that no human is in fact capable of. What happens is there’s the kind of a space that you become aware of between ordinary physical limits and the boundlessness of our aspiration.

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Trevor Smith on Rivane Neuenschwander: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

In Watchword, Rivane Neuenschwander invites us to play a variation on magnetic poetry. Instead of a refrigerator, we have the world map. Onto this oceanic surface we’re invited to place words that connote responsibility, agency, and empowerment.

The artist has gleaned these from images of protest signs found on the internet. There are so many protest movements in the world today that they are in danger of becoming background noise.

I love how her game shifts our attention to the emotion and language that connect vastly disparate movements. I also love that she invites us to pin these words to our clothes to that we can wear them like a badge of honor.

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Trevor Smith on Pedro Reyes: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

One of the things that interests me about Pedro Reyes is his use of play to engage with utopian ideas about social change. Disarm is one of a number of works in which he has taken guns that were used in the narco wars in Mexico and transformed them into more useful objects.

In one work, he melted down the weapons to cast them into shovels that were then used to plant trees, but what can be more utopian or playful than turning guns into musical instruments?

It is fascinating to watch these weapons operate in ways far from their original lethal purpose, but the music they play does not necessarily invite peaceful reflection. They may also be calling us to action.

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Trevor Smith on Paul McCarthy: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

Paul McCarthy is an L.A. guy. He’s fascinated by Hollywood and legendary figures like Walt Disney, whose work underpins ideas about modern American morality and ethics.

Pinocchio is one of the darker stories that Disney adapted for the screen. It is the story of a wooden marionette who wishes to become a boy. Pinocchio’s nose grows whenever he tells a lie and he’s practically a poster child for misbehavior.

Pinocchio could be the mascot of this exhibition since play offers kind of a safe space to misbehave.

McCarthy calls his boy Pinocchio Pipenose, a brutal industrial metaphor that contrasts sharply with Pinocchio’s loving creation by a wood carver.

Pinocchio Pipenose plays perversely with mass-produced condiments, such as ketchup, mayonnaise, and chocolate sauce. It’s an abject performance of infantile behavior and waste.

When kids play with their food, it’s cute. When adults do it, it’s disgusting.

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Trevor Smith on Nick Cave: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

In the video Bunny Boy, we see a darkened space lit by a single spotlight. Artist Nick Cave, dressed in a pink bunny suit, moves slowly, cautiously, sometimes seductively. He skirts the spotlight moving in and out of shadow as if he’s uncertain of the consequences of his visibility.

Watching this from a narrowing darkened corridor, I get the uncanny sensation that I am seeing something that is both real and imaginary. Even the moments when he steps fully into the spotlight, it feels like I’m watching something private, even secret.

When Cave began making his works in the early 1990s, he likened them to suits of armor so it’s remarkable to see here the artist’s powerful black torso exposed.

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Trevor Smith on Martin Creed: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

I installed a different version of Martin Creed’s Half the Air in a Given Space a few years ago at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard.

We installed the work in the entrance to the museum itself and one of the things that I observed was that when people arrived at the museum they all kind of had a serious expression on their face like they were gonna learn something or that they had to pay attention and then when they went through the balloon room and I saw their faces afterwards, their faces had really lit up and they were kind of full of joy and laughter and it really transformed their expectations of the rest of the experience to follow.

One of the things that I like about Martin’s work is that it’s at one level very simple: exactly half the air is contained by balloons and half is not. In each case there’s a calculation of the volume of air in a room, there’s a calculation of the volume of air in each balloon which gives you the number of balloons you have to blow up. It’s very simple mathematical proposition, but the experience that you of the work is something very different.

You can experience joy and wonder and play and laughter. Some people even might be a little claustrophobic being completely surrounded by balloons. It is such an immersive, playful experience. You can’t really stand back from it. You have to go into it, explore it, be with it. There’s no space between you and the work itself.

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Trevor Smith on Mark Bradford: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

Have you ever felt like a fish out of water? As a young man growing up it was assumed that because he was so tall Mark Bradford would want to become a basketball player, but, in fact, he was much more drawn to hair design and wanted to work in his mother’s salon.

In this video, Bradford plays with both career expectations and gender norms by wearing a hoop skirt to practice basketball. The flowing skirt gets in the way of dribbling and trips him up as he drives for the basket. It’s a way for him to create an image of tension between appearance and desire.

Each of us has had some kind of experience where we’re expected to behave a specific way, but we either have to roleplay or resist. Such struggles are very often the seedbed for creative expression.

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Trevor Smith on Lara Favaretto: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

I love that Lara Favaretto made this work from car wash brushes because it connects to a really common experience that many of us have shared.

Driving through the car wash, I’m often mesmerized by the patterns and colors that form on my windshield as the brushes pass over. Sometimes I even think it would make an amazing painting.

In Simple Couples, there are seven pairs of car wash brushes, all of different heights and widths and colors, just like people.

Like several other artists you will see in PlayTime, Favaretto is taking an off-the-shelf object made for a singular purpose and imagines a new life for it. These brushes will no longer wash your car; however, they have new life as paintings, as kinetic sculpture, as objects of wonder.

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Trevor Smith on Gwen Smith: Transcript

Posted on by Rebecca Bednarz

I first saw these photographs by Gwen Smith when they would arrive in my mailbox each December as holiday cards. Most family cards that we receive depict awkwardly staged portraits that ruthlessly repress any tensions or interpersonal negotiations we all know were going on.

Smith takes a very different tack using play to amplify the character of her family relationships. The one constant is the presence of a Yoda mask, a depiction of the wise mentor from Star Wars. He appears as an unchanging avatar around which the annual ritual revolves.

In all but one image, it is worn by her husband, artist Haim Steinbach. We see the fashions of play changing as her son, River, grows up. We see him using play to define his own character, to draw closer to or resist the omnipresent Yoda.

I find the unusual invitation Smith makes with her family to roleplay with one another to be very vulnerable and moving.

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