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Art review: ‘Suspension,’ video by Reynold Reynolds, Kevin Cooley

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Kevin Cooley’s “Skyward” makes a perfect endpoint to “Suspension,” an absorbing, two-person show of recent video works at YoungProjects. Most of the gallery is taken up by the work of Berlin-based Reynold Reynolds, every piece an intense excursion into the nature of time and its representation as movement and change, the body and its capacity to endure. Nods to the stop-motion photographs of Marey and Muybridge alternate with discomfiting scenes of physical violation. Scientific and aesthetic inquiry intersect, sometimes with damaging force. In “Burn” (a 2002 collaboration with Patrick Jolly), we watch a man set fire to a bed where a woman sleeps, and another man using a sandwich to tamp out — with disturbing calm — the flames rising from his shirt as he reads. It’s not just the filmed characters who are facing something treacherous.

Then comes the physically and visually quenching “Skyward” (2012). The seven-minute loop is projected on the ceiling, so it is best viewed lying down. That 90-degree shift of position aligns us with the camera, which delivers tracking shots looking upward at the L.A. sky, edged by architecture, fringed by palm trees, sliced by power lines, etched by the paths of birds and planes. The day performs itself as usual, but with our perspective gently recalibrated by the New York-based Cooley, the view feels fresh and new.

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-- Leah Ollman

YoungProjects, Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., (323) 377-1102, through March 8. Closed Saturday through Monday. http://www.youngprojectsgallery.com/

Images: Left, Reynold Reynolds, ‘Burn’; right, Kevin Cooley, ‘Skyward.’ Credit: From YoungProjects

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