60 WRD / MIN ART CRITIC // by Lori Waxman dOCUMENTA (13)
(2012)
Art history is full of old, fragmented, precious materials. Given the immense resources that go into the preservation of cultural artifacts like Egyptian tomb paintings, Greek temple friezes, Buddhist sculptures and American Indian animal hides, it comes as a splendid surprise to discover DianaKahn’s artwork. Although based on hieroglyphs and other ancient representational systems, DianaKahn’s drawings are profoundly ephemeral. She works improvisationally and in nature, choosing her materials based on the season. Sketches in ink on snow, ice and water disappear in seconds, minutes, hours or days. Twigs, cracks, footprints, tire tracks and reflections vie for compositional attention with black brushwork depicting a Greek mother and child, the face of a Buddhist deity, an Egyptian ritual. A patch of snow holds a fragment of an image, like a shard of stone or a worn mural. And then it’s gone, melted, washed away, back into the ground-except that now, a thousand years later, DianaKahn can use a camera to take photographs.
Lori Waxman 8/11/12 4:55 PM
