From Whitehouse’s Central Park video.
Thanks to the medium of video, the Ben Whitehouse and Jun Kaneko exhibits at the Arkansas Arts Center require more than just a casual drop-in. Whitehouse’s real-time video landscapes — of Central Park, a bowl of fruit and the Lake Michigan shore — are hypnotic. So is the soundless video showing Kaneko in the process of building and firing his enormous ceramic sculptures, cutting, pounding, pinching, stacking, painting; the first image is the sun rising, the last is the moon.
There is so much going on in these fine exhibits that words fail, both visually and intellectually. Whitehouse’s large-scale paintings of distant shores and luminous lakes and big sky and Kaneko’s giant “dangos” and bird’s egg blue Buddha head are gorgeous works of art. Whitehouse’s digital videos (24 hours long) are his attempt at creating living landscape. Though he is a deft painter, he wants to capture more.
In the Jeannette Rockefeller gallery, “Revolution: Bowl of Fruit” video is still life and unstill life, both cerebral and funny. The bowl of fruit is unchanging; the landscape, seen through a window in the background, is ever-changing, leaves blowing in a wind, people walking on the beach.