A Melting Pot of Media at the Queens Museum of Art

It’s a bright and momentous occasion that takes a Columbian not just out of the Morningside bubble, but onto the mystic 7 line and all the way to Queens.

“Queens International 4” emits one such beckoning call. The fourth in a series of exhibitions held by the Queens Museum of Art, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a collection of work from numerous artists working in and around the multicultural neighborhood. Volcanically creative, “Queens” is an exotic ensemble of art alive with the borough’s cultural and visual diversity.
The museum itself is easily as large as the Met and stands out like a slate temple in the middle of Queens. While Manhattan is an Olympus of art, it is off the mountain where the most sensational stories occur. And some truly interesting things are happening outside of Manhattan.

In a dark room, Tommy Hartung’s, School of the Arts ’06, Edward Holmes and the Family Tree ‘stay golden pony boy,’ is a video montage of clipped BBC footage from the Ascent of Man series portraying mud-brown children bathing in a river. The scenes are interjected with bizarre surrealist flashes of women and nature. In the artists’ words, the concept is to explore the mind of Man’s BBC narrator J. Bronowski. Meant as a dip, it feels more like a dunk—disorienting and rushed as the camera swims roughly from scene to scene. However, Hartung’s work seems less impressive compared with Ha Na Lee’s adjacent video display, Abrasion, a short but absorbing silent film recording a South Korean female’s violent response to a pig slaughtering.

The steel-entwined wooden structure of Yasue Maetake, School of the Arts ’06, juts up like a skyscraper, while standing on a river of steel branches covered in images of translucent tadpoles. According to the artist, she challenges the wood, steel, and bamboo’s so-called strength: Are they really as durable as they seem? Or, like the tadpoles, are they both weaker and stronger than they look? Like Hartung, the concept behind Maetake’s work rouses interest, but the execution renders the message lost in the complexity and garbled assembly of the piece.

No doubt Hartung and Maetake entice the eyes–but not as successfully as Kymia Nawabi’s most visually explosive pieces AH HA! HA! HA and Kaleidoscope Diamond Eyes. Both mixed media pieces stand ten feet in height and best epitomize the spirit of the exhibition: vivid, creative and unapologetically ecstatic and tortured at the same time.

In AH HA! HA! HA, an assault of limbs and Victorian dresses pulse against supernovas of red, pale blue, and chalk, like a dynamo. Nawabi comments that her work is a catharsis of her psychological demons. This is palpable, for no matter how full her canvas, Nawabi balances the edges with a serene border of negative space. To put it simply, she contains chaos.

Suggested donation-only, this is one exhibit unequivocally worth the trip off the mountain. While in impressive company, our fair alumni were sadly some of the less show-stopping. Nevertheless, Hartung and Maetake still do Columbia proud by holding their own among a phenomenal flock. While walking through the exhibition, its magnitude brought to mind that age-old question: where do graduates go after they graduate? As Hartung and Maetake demonstrate: to stand among the greats.

The Queens Museum is located in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. “International 4” runs through April 26th.