Last night an intriguing little show opened up at SOIL. It's by Vesna Pavlovic and Nicholas Nyland, and it's based on an old collection of tourist shots taken by a wealthy woman on her travels around the world. She made the strange choice of donating them to a university, mistakenly thinking they might make a good art show someday.
When the university was getting rid of them recently, Pavlovic snapped them up.
They made a good art show after all—just not the kind the woman thought.
This is Nyland's black wall painting based on a parlor seen in one of the slides.
This is a large contact-sheet-style print of the slides. My favorite is top center, marked "Caravaggio." You can't make out the actual painting. It is possibly the worst photograph ever taken of a Caravaggio.
Nyland will talk about the meaning of all this tomorrow at 2 at the gallery.
