Kissing Constructs: Barbara Kasten`s Surreal Photography at the

 Kissing Constructs: Barbara Kasten’s Surreal Photography at the Chicago
Architecture Biennial
By Bika Rebek
October 7, 2015
Barbara Kasten’s all-analog photography from the 1980’s is on display at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. (courtesy Graham
Foundation)
Thursday night, Barbara Kasten’s first major retrospective opened at the Graham
Foundation as an offsite event of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Set in the Madlener
house, a turn-of-the century Prairie-Style mansion, the exhibition brings together a roughly
chronological overview of the artist’s practice from the 1970s until today. The works on display
are of an astonishingly contemporary quality—many of the framed photographs follow the
aesthetic paradigms of current net—or Tumblr art featuring primitive geometric shapes of
varying surface texture lit in a rich palette of pastel colors forming surreal spatial compositions.
“Kissing Constructs: Barbara Kasten’s Surreal Photography at the Chicago Architecture Biennial.” Architect’s Newspaper,
By: Bika Rebek. (October 7, 2015) http://blog.archpaper.com/2015/10/kissing-constructs-barbara-kastens-surrealphotography/
Kasten started her career working with fibers, with some of the most impressive works in the
show being a series of cyanotype prints from the 1970s achieved by laying down fiberglass
molds onto large sheets coated with chemicals. The images evoke seemingly threedimensional rippled fabric brought to the flat plane through a technical process.
Barbara Kasten’s all-analog photography from the 1980’s is on display at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. (courtesy Graham
Foundation)
Moving further into the third dimension Kasten started to build large-scale studio sets in the
1970s. Her forms highly geometric at first, she increasingly started adding more specific
elements such as column details from architectural catalogues. These photographs are highly
reminiscent of much more recent images circulating on the internet produced with 3d modeling
and rendering software. Many of the analogue processes used by Kasten in this phase of her
work can be applied particularly well in the virtual domain. The backgrounds are simplistic and
contained, there is no natural light or environment to complicate the render process, and the
objects are geometric primitives or sourced from catalogues rather than created from scratch.
Despite formal similarities a significant difference separates the ethereal digital spaces from
Barbara Kasten meticulously constructed environments. As Kasten points out in a recent
interview, weight and gravity play an important role in the construction of sculptures. The
props used by Kasten are never mounted in place but rest on or adjacent to each other through
gravity.
By the 1980s Kasten moved on to incorporating existing buildings into her sets, transforming
them through light, color, and mirrors to create compositional photographs. She first worked
with corporate headquarters and financial centers and later turned to museums as different
kind of spaces of authority. Depicting these composed, lasting, authoritative buildings with
temporary, fragile, colorful and disorienting sensibility she produced what Sylvia Lavin coined a
“Kissing Constructs: Barbara Kasten’s Surreal Photography at the Chicago Architecture Biennial.” Architect’s Newspaper,
By: Bika Rebek. (October 7, 2015) http://blog.archpaper.com/2015/10/kissing-constructs-barbara-kastens-surrealphotography/
kiss, or a powerful statement through a gentle gesture. The images produced in this series act
as records of an atmospheric transformation of a number of establishment-reinforcing spaces.
Barbara Kasten’s all-analog photography from the 1980’s is on display at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. (Bika Rebek/AN)
On the third floor of the Madlener house the show culminates with a site specific installation.
With moving light projections directed at sculptural forms it is like one of her photographic
stages come to life. It is a beautiful experience yet also feels like an unmasking of a magicians
trick—with the mechanism behind the photographs exposed, the stage-like installation loses
some of the precision and specificity of the highly controlled still frames. The piece is most
successful at illustrating the incredible breadth of Barbara Kasten’s work, blurring the
boundaries between art, installation, and architecture—despite the fact that all the illusions
are based on the limits of physical space.
“Kissing Constructs: Barbara Kasten’s Surreal Photography at the Chicago Architecture Biennial.” Architect’s Newspaper,
By: Bika Rebek. (October 7, 2015) http://blog.archpaper.com/2015/10/kissing-constructs-barbara-kastens-surrealphotography/