What makes Nina Katchadourian laugh?
This is the question that has occupied my mind since viewing Curiouser, Katchadourian’s mid-career retrospective now on view at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts. Curated by Veronica Roberts for the Blanton Museum in Austin, the Cantor Center is the only West Coast stop this charming installation will make. For Katchadourian, who was born and raised in Stanford, it is a sort homecoming. For audiences, it is an opportunity to, as the artist does, appreciate the magic that can be found in the mundane.
Katchadourian’s wide ranging interests — mapping, translation and public space — are framed by opposing concepts: expanse and limitation. Expanse is the artist’s fertile imagination, the beginnings of which are exposed in the video installation The Recarcassing Ceremony.
Originally commissioned by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the 24-minute single-channel video recounts a childhood game gone astray. The artist and her brother Kai once lost a toy boat and two Playmobil figures to unpredictable surf. The film, assembled from family interviews and historical audio recordings, re-enacts a ceremony in which the souls of the lost figurines were transplanted into the bodies of two other plastic figurines.
While voicing with all the maturity she can muster the “family members” who help to revive the Lazarus-like characters, Katchadourian’s voice breaks into unrestrained giggles. Those of us in the theater also laughed, because how could we not? By itself, the playfully re-staged ceremony and nostalgic conversations with her parents about ritualistic adolescent play is absorbing. When it pivots unexpectedly to capture a stark existential truth — change, or loss — as her adult sibling recalls the moment when he knew that the days of imaginative adventures with his sister were numbered, the honesty is heart-rending.
Limitation in Katchadourian’s work is evident throughout her projects. Photographing titles for the series Sorted Books, she works only with what’s made accessible by a given collector or institution, and always to poetic and hilarious ends.