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Reliquaries
by ly n n co ol
into his works, and incorporates glass or magnifying Victorian portrait of a woman by creating a kinetic multi-
lenses to protect, obscure or enlarge the relic. In his sensual experience. In a video of the piece in action,
Poetical Modesty, glass becomes the elemental object- Lo Bue presents an altered perception of time through
turned-subject within tightly framed camera shots of enmeshing chain-
which viewers may driven gears and a ratchety raising and lowering of the
In a sense, be transfixed. Lo Bue ambrotype. Thus the viewer witnesses the unfolding of
all artists who reconfigures a 19th-century simultaneously ponderous and fleeting existence.
incorporate found glass ambrotype photo Hungarian-American Agnes Pal avoids the traditional
objects are connected as a digitally fused reliquary form but retains its associations through
to the reliquary. image, then enlivens this references to Holocaust survivorship. The wearer of Icy
Descent, a brooch with a rough-hewn upper register, Numbered raises the question, “What would it take to
diagonally traversing silver wires, and an unfaceted burst someone’s spirit?”7 Two hundred and twenty-four
aquamarine, becomes a copper squares, hydraulically constrained into wrinkled,
living reliquary, archiving torn domes, bear portraits that symbolically represent
All of the artists Pal's experience of a forced- family, friends and neighbors she noticed missing after
here are united march camp relocation the war.
through their ties down a mountain. Re-contextualized religious iconography offers
to the reliquary, but In another reliquary of much to contemplate within Al Farrow’s sculpture.
each follows his or personal and collective Farrow entices the viewer to closely examine his works’
her own schematic. memory, Pal’s sculpture intricacies, in what appear to be medieval body-part