Bound in a tête-bêche format as two books in one, this thoughtfully designed volume documents two gallery exhibitions by the New York-based artist Darren Bader, highlighting the sculptural and linguistic pas-de-deux central to his practice. In "rocks and mirrors" at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin, a landscape of rocks and mirrors inhabits the gallery space. Images proliferate in the reflective surfaces of the mirrors, while the opacity of the boulders and stones remains untouchable. Rocks and mirrors are discussed in untranslated texts in five different languages (English, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Farsi). In "Forest/Trees," Bader's show at Greenspon in New York, the artist continues his idiosyncratic arrangement of language, mining online mp3 libraries to build dense new audio files composed of songs whose titles relate to sundry themes or phrases. The audio was played from a constellation of wall-mounted speakers, resulting in an impenetrable wall of sound. The convergence of these visually distinct shows in a single book offers a further opportunity for viewers to think, like Bader, about "language and immediate optical experience and where piquant impressions and illusions can take you."
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