Review from the San Francisco Chronicle
2007
'Test' pilot by Pam Grady
Sunday, July 1, 2007
In "Wanna Play Toy," one of the baker's dozen of photographs that make up artist Sabrina Raaf's current Limn Gallery exhibition, "Test People," a man floats, knees bent under him, just beneath his kitchen ceiling. On the floor, many feet below him, a tiny truck shoots sparks high into the air, while on the far left side, shattering glass rains down into the room.
By phone from her Chicago home, Raaf explains that she imagined the toy gone amok.
"It has literally kind of blasted him," she says. "The toy's shooting him off the wall. He's literally flying off the wall from this little toy that's gone haywire. It comes back to that idea of, while you have all this mastery and control over these technologies, the reality is that it's controlling you or actually causing you harm."
Not all of the characters in "Test People" take flight or otherwise test the bounds of gravity, but it is a recurring theme in the photos, a future world made familiar by the spaces where the action takes place: a kitchen, a bathroom, a laundry room, various living rooms and studios, all in apartments belonging to artists in the process of moving in or out when the photographs were taken.
"They appear like sort of perfect test grounds, sort of decaying 20th century architecture, old, beat-up apartments," Raaf says. "The places that urban people are familiar with."
The artist may be more famous for her work with robotics, such as Translator II: Grower, a roving vehicle that draws blades of grass on walls in response to the level of carbon dioxide in a room; or Dry Translator, an interactive sculpture that comments on smart technology by allowing a kind of interaction between human beings and walls.
Raaf, who describes herself as "a science geek," extends that interest in technology through her photography. The subjects in "Test People" live in a place where humans can fly, or at least defy gravity, and take part in experiments that test the limits of this breakthrough in real-world environments.
"Antigravity, what would that look like? What would that feel like?" are the questions that the artist asked herself as she began the project.
"I think (flight) is something people are innately interested in," Raaf says. "For me, it's a metaphor for one of those things that we want, but if you put it in reality is maybe (not what you wanted). The things in our culture today that we're so obsessed with -- connectivity and speed, the newest and the latest, and other things that we seem to want -- bring us a lot of imbalance and a lot of turbulence and unhappiness. The antigravity and weightlessness of the images is used as a stand-in for that."
Not all of the photographs reflect that uneasiness. In "Alone Again" and "Levitated," solo characters in barren rooms seem to have found some sort of balance or peace as they float in the air. Raaf agrees that the people in those pictures have achieved a moment of perfection.
"There's a stillness," she says. "Those are the ones where I feel like the person has given into it and has attained control over time in a lot of ways. The people struggling against time, they're alarmed and perhaps moving too quickly, and in those images it's as if the people were able to float in time. But, still, if you look closely at the image, there's always (something)."
In "Levitated," it is a black smoke ring floating toward the man who hovers in complete repose.
"No matter what, you can't have that moment of perfect balance and grace and timelessness and isolation," Raaf says. "There's no possibility for isolation."
The shattered glass of "Wanna Play Toy" repeats in several of the photographs, a recurring motif that adds to the theme.
"Those elements of shattering glass are suggestive of things coming in from the outside, things explosively coming in from the outside," she says. "It comes back to the age of innovation and the speed that we live in. At moments, you can achieve balance in your life, but then at any point, something can burst in from the outside and everything that had been harmonious for a very short time can become traumatized. That's really what that is about. It's that force coming from the outside, the explosive forces of society."
Raaf says the title of her series of photographs comes from the term sometimes used to refer to World War II concentration camp victims who were used as guinea pigs by the Nazis, often to test how pilots might survive under various extreme conditions. The idea extends to other historical periods and other societies in which prisoners have been used in experimentation.
"I was just pushing forward that metaphor, our cultural metaphor," she says. "But really the series is very much about the here and now, about all of our struggles with righting ourselves in a culture that's going so fast that you really cannot achieve balance."
While the subject may be serious, the execution is often playful. The kitchen tableau of "Wanna Play Toy" is amusing, and so is "Too Much Sun," in which two women -- one just a pair of legs in strappy silver sandals and the other caught in the middle of a dye job, with red dye staining the back of her white shirt -- watch as an out-of-control human Icarus outside their window plunges to the ground. Then there is "Fat Drain, Feeling Drained," in which a woman whose torso is covered with what looks like nicotine patches bathes while apparently giving herself home liposuction in a future in which Raaf imagines that excess fat can be recycled.
"What if human is the next step in recycling, and how can we combine that with our luxury state of culture? So you can have that gluttony and eat all you want and then feel good, because you're processing your fat out into something else that can be useful," Raaf says.
"All of the situations are domestic. They're all indoors. I choose the spaces for their domestic familiarity. The images aren't meant to be 2001 spectacular. They're meant to be 10 years from now. They're in very unassuming places. They're mundane places. I'm hoping that familiarity will shake people a little bit when they see that."
SABRINA RAAF: The exhibition runs through July 15. 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues.- Sat. Limn Gallery, 292 Townsend St., San Francisco. (415) 977-1300, www.limnartgallery.com.
Pam Grady is a freelance writer.
Sunday, July 1, 2007
In "Wanna Play Toy," one of the baker's dozen of photographs that make up artist Sabrina Raaf's current Limn Gallery exhibition, "Test People," a man floats, knees bent under him, just beneath his kitchen ceiling. On the floor, many feet below him, a tiny truck shoots sparks high into the air, while on the far left side, shattering glass rains down into the room.
By phone from her Chicago home, Raaf explains that she imagined the toy gone amok.
"It has literally kind of blasted him," she says. "The toy's shooting him off the wall. He's literally flying off the wall from this little toy that's gone haywire. It comes back to that idea of, while you have all this mastery and control over these technologies, the reality is that it's controlling you or actually causing you harm."
Not all of the characters in "Test People" take flight or otherwise test the bounds of gravity, but it is a recurring theme in the photos, a future world made familiar by the spaces where the action takes place: a kitchen, a bathroom, a laundry room, various living rooms and studios, all in apartments belonging to artists in the process of moving in or out when the photographs were taken.
"They appear like sort of perfect test grounds, sort of decaying 20th century architecture, old, beat-up apartments," Raaf says. "The places that urban people are familiar with."
The artist may be more famous for her work with robotics, such as Translator II: Grower, a roving vehicle that draws blades of grass on walls in response to the level of carbon dioxide in a room; or Dry Translator, an interactive sculpture that comments on smart technology by allowing a kind of interaction between human beings and walls.
Raaf, who describes herself as "a science geek," extends that interest in technology through her photography. The subjects in "Test People" live in a place where humans can fly, or at least defy gravity, and take part in experiments that test the limits of this breakthrough in real-world environments.
"Antigravity, what would that look like? What would that feel like?" are the questions that the artist asked herself as she began the project.
"I think (flight) is something people are innately interested in," Raaf says. "For me, it's a metaphor for one of those things that we want, but if you put it in reality is maybe (not what you wanted). The things in our culture today that we're so obsessed with -- connectivity and speed, the newest and the latest, and other things that we seem to want -- bring us a lot of imbalance and a lot of turbulence and unhappiness. The antigravity and weightlessness of the images is used as a stand-in for that."
Not all of the photographs reflect that uneasiness. In "Alone Again" and "Levitated," solo characters in barren rooms seem to have found some sort of balance or peace as they float in the air. Raaf agrees that the people in those pictures have achieved a moment of perfection.
"There's a stillness," she says. "Those are the ones where I feel like the person has given into it and has attained control over time in a lot of ways. The people struggling against time, they're alarmed and perhaps moving too quickly, and in those images it's as if the people were able to float in time. But, still, if you look closely at the image, there's always (something)."
In "Levitated," it is a black smoke ring floating toward the man who hovers in complete repose.
"No matter what, you can't have that moment of perfect balance and grace and timelessness and isolation," Raaf says. "There's no possibility for isolation."
The shattered glass of "Wanna Play Toy" repeats in several of the photographs, a recurring motif that adds to the theme.
"Those elements of shattering glass are suggestive of things coming in from the outside, things explosively coming in from the outside," she says. "It comes back to the age of innovation and the speed that we live in. At moments, you can achieve balance in your life, but then at any point, something can burst in from the outside and everything that had been harmonious for a very short time can become traumatized. That's really what that is about. It's that force coming from the outside, the explosive forces of society."
Raaf says the title of her series of photographs comes from the term sometimes used to refer to World War II concentration camp victims who were used as guinea pigs by the Nazis, often to test how pilots might survive under various extreme conditions. The idea extends to other historical periods and other societies in which prisoners have been used in experimentation.
"I was just pushing forward that metaphor, our cultural metaphor," she says. "But really the series is very much about the here and now, about all of our struggles with righting ourselves in a culture that's going so fast that you really cannot achieve balance."
While the subject may be serious, the execution is often playful. The kitchen tableau of "Wanna Play Toy" is amusing, and so is "Too Much Sun," in which two women -- one just a pair of legs in strappy silver sandals and the other caught in the middle of a dye job, with red dye staining the back of her white shirt -- watch as an out-of-control human Icarus outside their window plunges to the ground. Then there is "Fat Drain, Feeling Drained," in which a woman whose torso is covered with what looks like nicotine patches bathes while apparently giving herself home liposuction in a future in which Raaf imagines that excess fat can be recycled.
"What if human is the next step in recycling, and how can we combine that with our luxury state of culture? So you can have that gluttony and eat all you want and then feel good, because you're processing your fat out into something else that can be useful," Raaf says.
"All of the situations are domestic. They're all indoors. I choose the spaces for their domestic familiarity. The images aren't meant to be 2001 spectacular. They're meant to be 10 years from now. They're in very unassuming places. They're mundane places. I'm hoping that familiarity will shake people a little bit when they see that."
SABRINA RAAF: The exhibition runs through July 15. 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues.- Sat. Limn Gallery, 292 Townsend St., San Francisco. (415) 977-1300, www.limnartgallery.com.
Pam Grady is a freelance writer.
