Concrete Column
Concrete Column marks Wolfgang Tillmans’s eighth solo exhibition at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. The exhibition includes photographs from well recognized bodies of work as well as new work in photography, video and the artist’s debut full-length musical album.
Playing in the listening room is Tillmans’s Moon in Earthlight: a 53-minute piece comprised of 19 tracks. The album ranges from field recordings and demure dance music to pop-adjacent tracks. Named after the phenomenon where the new moon’s full circle is achieved through light reflected from Earth, the album similarly explores the infinite and astronomical in range, yet stays grounded with Tillmans’s voice keeping a steady timbre (outside of the autotune pop track, that is). True to its namesake, the album keeps it light with words and in its ethereal aural form.
Many works in the exhibition reference the cosmic quite literally, as photographs of the moon, while other works pay heed to space as suspension conceptually. One iPhone-shot work looks eerily similar to the vines that grow from the CA-2 highway grazing Riverside Drive’s road in Los Angeles while another catches a swimmer mid-dive above Geos 2 where sand begets sand over time as a massive rock formation is photographed on sand. There is something serendipitous about such suspensions. It is not so much that Tillmans’s captures the right moment, the transient in matter’s shape shifting—after all, matter’s constant is this indeterminacy in space-time, if we take quantum’s approach. Instead, the artist’s works in Concrete Column gesture to a destabilization towards worlds where such suspensions (much like works strewn around to capture our eye at comfortable and corner levels) are our groundings to wander from.
The show runs until December 23, 2021.