Frieze Magazine
April 2013 Issue No. 154
“Barbara Kasten: Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco”
Written by Joseph Akel
In a passage from his 1658 treatise ‘The Garden of Cyrus,’ Sir Thomas Browne wrote of a room wherein ‘pictures from objects’, projected upon the walls of a dim enclosure, were ‘answerable to paper.’ Browne, a hermetically inclined English polymath, was describing a camera obscura. A mechanism involving the channeling and transposition of light in the creation of a reflected image, a camera obscura operates much in the same way as a human eye does – a fact not lost upon Browne. Reading his treatise, one could be forgiven in thinking the detailing of ‘pyramidal rays,’ tenebrific rooms and the mirrored transposition of light upon entities of ‘crystalline humour’ was a description of Barbara Kasten’s recent show at Jessica Silverman Gallery, ‘Behind the Curtain’.
Read the rest of the review here.
