Adrienne Klein: Radiant Logic

Holocenter – The Center for Holographic Art
45-10 Court Square, New York, NY
1 June - 19 July 2008
Center’s website: http://www.holocenter.org/.

Reviewed by Susan Gamble

susan@wengam.com


The Holocenter is a workshop for artists to make holograms, as well as a gallery, in Long Island City, Queens, New York, close to MOMA/PS1 and other emerging galleries. It is one of the few holographic facilities still remaining, and allows artists access through rental or a competitive residency scheme. Adrienne Klein’s work is the result of such an award.

Unlike many previous exhibits at the Center, this small show has only a single hologram; however, Klein sites it with another piece that is equally illusory and revealing of the tropes that such illusions address. Both works are united by Klein’s exploration of the public presentation of science and data.

What interests me about Klein’s use of the hologram is that in Radiant Logic, 2002, she uses the medium to comment on popular scientific imagery. Klein combines the famous NASA image of the earth from space— a digital image presented here on a lap-top screen— along with computer data she has recorded and overlaid on the screen in the form of a transparent hologram. Her combination is simple and could be a taken for a serious prototype— it is part of her creation’s illusory power that we accept this combination, which appears to be a ‘holographic computer screen’, a product that might actually exist. Klein’s use of the medium is also true to its history. Denis Gabor’s original application for the hologram, published in 1947, was for scientific imaging: to enable imagery generated with an electron beam to be seen as optical imagery that was three-dimensional, and could be raked through in layers with a microscope, even though only a few microns in depth. Throughout his career he adhered to his original ambition of a holographic microscope despite the emergence, from 1963 onwards, of the popular laser hologram. The invention of new imagery for serious science was, for Gabor, the nobler pursuit.

Klein states that her work is about the search for systems of organization and the suggestion of multiple perspectives, and it raises these issues as the work leads the viewer in search of a scientific authority, a meaning, that they fail to find. In the process, the viewer becomes seduced by the intriguing mechanics of the image. This is the case with Klein’s Amber with Insect: dissosteira carolina, a museum display case with three lumps of simulated ‘amber’. The amber, containing insects, is beautifully lit from beneath, however on inspection the insects slowly move. Like Radiant Logic, which references the first picture of earth from space, a repeatedly used image in advertising, amber too has been a popular icon. Amber was a nineteenth-century jewel and has gained a new mythical status— generated by films such as Jurassic Park— as a source of lost DNA. In watching the moving insects, generated through digital imagery, our aspirations of finding knowledge in the re-constructed past are made apparent. Klein plays with the insights the viewer hopes for, and the information museums aim to offer with such technical presentations.