Jul 21, 20183 min read

The Echoing Sounds of Reverb at Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA

Reverb at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles. Photo credit: Genie Davis.

The Echoing Sounds of Reverb at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Through July 22nd

By Genie Davis

Reverb, the group show at Tiger Strikes Astroid closing July 22nd, began with an opening in which the visual art fused with the auditory. A poetry reading held a circle of viewers riveted, as if they themselves were suspended in time and space.

It was a fitting beginning for the group show, curated by TSA LA member Kari Reardon, and featuring works by Clint Campbell, Maureen Keaveny, Nick Rodrigues, and Peter Segerstrom.

The show’s artists work to reflect the idea of signals in space, reverberations as it were, of sound, spirit, sight, human knowledge, and technology. And of course, what goes beyond all of that. The creation of the universe, possibly, or the Zen-like drip of water suspended from a water-cooler sculpture. Positing that the show is an exploration of the ways in which all of these elements – nature, tech, sound, sight – interact, the show boldly offers images which to some extent need to be seen collectively rather than individually to absorb the internal and external environments they create.

The exhibition is truly at heart about order and chaos, about the position life itself straddles between the two. Its structure is that of the dichotomy and similarity between nature and technology, both arenas offer the chance to explore ordered forms of life and the chaotic.

Indeed, the show is a cooperative yin and yang. Poet Clint Campbell recited from his recent book, Nature Garage; musical accompaniment was by Peter Segerstrom. Marine Keaveny’s lush black and white photographic work and the sculptural works by Nick Rodrigues provided the visual components.

Keaveny’s work verges on the surreal, the backgrounds realistic, the images mysterious. Her luminous image of reflective, broken stone walls along a desert background is particularly haunting; the vestiges of a past or future civilization, something caught in time. In another work, a black spot, resembling a black hole in space, or a fuzzy alien lifeform, takes over the far-right corner of a photograph of washed-out rocky desert hills; to the left, a lighter haze of darkness renders the rocks still visible. These works from her 2015 series Grade, are the perfect evocation of technology assuming control of nature – or attempting to. The harshness of the deserted landscape might make a landing spot for this attempt or defy it. An archival pigment print from her 2017 series Black Corner, “Box 12,” is a rivetingly strange image, the promoted image for the show – it looks like crystals forming, like magnetic shards extending, something spinning out from space. It appears touchable, formidable, compelling. We are required to understand without understanding.

Rodrigues’ sculptures are beautiful and surreal: in one work, a large water jug is positioned on a gorgeous piece of wood from which a faucet descends. In another, a massive tree stump has two axes embedded in it, while a futuristic-looking pan of water drips, creating a perfectly circular formation of droplets as an ersatz fountain. The artist combines sculpture, performance and mixed media with engineering, his goal being to expose the ways in which technology can suppress individual expression. The result here are living sculpture hybrids: plants fused with robotics of sorts, a jerry-rigged assemblage that is both hallucinatory and visionary. The same can be said of all the elements of the show – it’s a trip, and worth taking.