Summer In Buffalo: Reviews Of The Current Exhibits At The Buffalo AKG Art Museum
"After The Sun - Forecasts From The North" and "Sin Wai Kin: It’s Always You"
Author’s Note: No Buffalo summer is complete without a day at the AKG Art Museum and a walk around Hoyt Lake. I hope you enjoy my previously published reviews of the Museum’s current exhibits. I have removed the paywall.
The Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s new exhibit After The Sun - Forecasts From The North opened Friday (April 26, 2024) in the museum’s new Gundlach Building. Conceptually ambitious, the collection seeks to “survey a generational response to the precarious state of our natural environment,” (AKG Buffalo Art Museum Press Release March 25, 2024).
After The Sun takes its name from Danish author Jonas Eika’s 2019 collection of acclaimed short stories. Eike’s book is a delight, filled with Kafkaesque images of late capitalism’s absurdity such as employees at a Copenhagen bank, which had collapsed into rubble, proceeding with business as usual (Alvin).
I went to the bank, hoping to get in touch with one of the employees who knew me and could probably help me. The ruins were still there. I climbed a piece of marble at the edge and looked over the wreckage, which lay spread across a large expanse, torn up like a lake full of garbage, steel gray and gray‑white, yellowish with wood here and there.
Above hung a dense swarm of insects and a dark, sweet smell like rotting tea leaves . . . [h]olding on to the marble, I lowered myself down, finding a foothold in the jagged walls. . .
Bank employees lay curled up, in broken and cocooned positions dictated by the uneven walls of the pit, with computers in their laps or on their stomachs. Their faces were dirty and pale, some were wearing masks in the dusty air. “Are you looking for someone?” a young man asked, and came over to help me out of the wall.
The relationship between Eika’s book and the exhibit is ambiguous. The AKG’s website explains:
As Eika’s book addresses the profound challenge of responding to forces that pull us apart, the artists included in “After the Sun” grapple with how artistic practice may or may not succeed at meaningfully shaping the future world.
If After The Sun aspires to “grapple with artistic practice” and “survey a generational response to the natural environment;” that mission failed to connect with this writer. That said, After The Sun’s eclectic collection of works by contemporary Scandinavian artists is compelling and worth seeing.
The Permeability of Organisms
Two themes emerged from the collection: the permeability of organic structures and the comparatively healthy relationship between Scandinavia’s indigenous peoples and the natural world.
Jane Jin Kaiser’s multi-screen video of humans suffering the deleterious effects of polluting our planet’s oceans (Offering - Coil Embrace, above) is jarring and effective; its troubling message is amplified by Felipe de Ávila Franco’s “The Trillionth Ton” (above) which makes clear that industry has no intention of mitigating pollution. Sadly, survival of the planet just isn’t cost effective.
Indigenous Peoples
Colonialism brought genocide and catastrophe to the indigenous peoples of the world; the influence of Swedish artist Olaf Marsja’s Sami heritage in his art gives some small indication as to how much was lost, (Pathfinder II, above). Marsja’s magical, hybrid figures seem to embody the Sami belief that all natural objects possess a soul.
Sarah Vide Ericson
The exhibit’s highlight is the canvases by Swedish artist Sarah Vide Ericson. “The Weaver” (above) is a stunning, mixed-media work containing grasses within oil illuminating a native figure, creating a Joan of Arc parallel; Ericson’s “Soul Fracking” (above) demonstrates how humans have deeply and casually scarred the earth.
“Soul Fracking” is a dramatic, large-scale work that evokes Monet’s winter landscapes with an echo of fellow Swede Alfred Wahlberg (1834-1906).
Any of After The Sun’s conceptual failures are redeemed by the high quality of its diverse collection and Sara Vide Ericson’s promising North American debut.
"After The Sun - Forecasts From The North" continues at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum until August 12, 2024. More information can be found here.
Sin Wai Kin is mixed-race and non-binary; their art is filled with a self-reflection most of us never engage in.
My skin is white, but I am aware that the world is filled with people whose epidermal hue registers on a boundless continuum from translucent white to deep black. My white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes do not make me objectively better or worse than any of my fellow humans despite disreputable, racist, bullshit, junk “science” that suggests otherwise.
I am biologically male; my gender perception corresponds with that. Further, I am romantically attracted to members of the opposite sex. This makes me “cisgender” and “heterosexual,” but it certainly does not make me “normal.”
As a married, middle-aged white man who acts and dresses like a married, middle-aged white man, society has never questioned my humanity or forced me to defend who I love or how I dress.
That is not the case for non-binary and transgender people.
As a civil rights lawyer I represented many members of the LGBTQ+ community who were the victims of unspeakable acts of discrimination and abuse. I quickly learned the hard lesson my brave clients had learned the hard way: much of society cares little for them and its legal systems treat the myriad, glaring injustices against their humanity with eye-rolling indifference.
Sin Wai Kin (they) is a Toronto-born artist whose deep, psychological art interrogates society’s binary views of human sexuality. Motivated by Octavia Butler’s belief that “the more personal the more universal,” they (Sin) created a single character, Victoria Sin, and observed how it operated in the world.
Victoria Sin led to the creation of more characters and “It’s Always You,” a pastiche of the “Boy Band.” It consists of a quartet of performative archetypes: the serious one, the egotist, the weirdo, and the storyteller.
“It’s Always You” is currently on exhibit at the AKG Buffalo Art Museum; it is an attenuated version of the original exhibit at the Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong.
The AKG installation in the new Gundlach Building consists of two video screens surrounded by curtains playing a high-definition loop of a generic “Boy Band.” Sin uses primary colors, prosthetic torsos and extensive makeup to mimic the Boy Band’s non-threatening, vaguely homoerotic, vibe.
The score consists of a prominent heartbeat and airy synthesizers; the “band”members lip sync bland lyrics (“one plus one’s not two when you’re with me - you’re like infinity”) which are spoken rather than sung. The room is wallpapered with logos and cheap posters demonstrating how performative sexuality is commodified for mass consumption.
The Buffalo AKG’s “It’s Always You” exhibit deconstructs the “Boy Band” archetype to expose society’s deep and often dark fascination with human sexuality. It’s a compelling display.
“It’s Always You” continues at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum until August 19, 2024. More information can be found here.
I would love to see this. Their take on the boy band culture is brilliant.