I had always considered my body a sort of home until I fell seriously ill. For over a year, all the things in
which I believed seemed to fail me over and again: Chinese medicine, Western medicine, and then religion.

Time and again my body failed to live up to the logic of these systems to which I had once been faithful. My body seemed so willful and malicious at times, failing me at precisely the moments that I needed it to perform. Just as I thought my body was repairing itself, it would show me just how little I knew of the way that it functioned. My body felt as if it were a strange new country where I could not even discern the fundamentals of the language. Doctors tried to map out this country. Cameras invaded my body and
attempted to render it in visual terms. The images that they produced, while textbook-familiar, revealed
nothing.

Be Takerng Pattanopas’ sculptures remind us of the uncanny spaces that we inhabit in the global capitalist economy. Freud used the term unheimlich or “unhomely” to refer to the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become de-familiarized, de-realized, as if in a dream (1). In Takerng’s work, what appears at first to be familiar to the point of being mundane becomes something unsettling and strange upon closer examination. While there is much about Takerng’s work that points literally to the human body, it also rises above metaphor to pose difficult questions about the quality of space in global capitalism.

In “Hal-O,” the solidness of the sculpture’s steel exterior gives way to a play on depth and perception. The monolithic exterior gives way to a series of sensual folds as the viewer’s eye is lead along a series of meandering tunnels. Although the immediate reference of “Hal-O” is the enigmatic computer in Stanley Kubrick’s film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the series conjures less obvious similarities to aspects of religiousarchitecture as well as contemporary art. Three references that come to mind are the tunnels attributed to King Ku Na at Wat Umong (Chiang Mai, ca. 1380 C.E.); the interstitial spaces of Gordon Matta-Clark like “A W-Hole House: Datum Cut, 1973”; and the way the eye is conducted in Marcel Duchamp’s “Étant Donnés.” At Wat Umong, pilgrims enter a series of connected tunnels underneath a hill. While the daily activities of the are usually conducted in pavilions closer to the temple entrance, the tunnels themselves remain the key architectural focus and the namesake of the complex. Fragments of paintings adorn the walls; their narrative meanings have faded long ago. In Matta-Clark’s work, the interior spaces of common dwellings are opened up to the exterior, breaking down the boundaries between private and public life.

Opening reception:
Wed, Sep 3, 2008 6pm - 9 pm