Jochen Lempert at Contemporary Art Centre

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When the new Planet Earth (II) came out there was a critique that the tiny slivers of the planet in exquisite 4k and presented on 70 ft screens made those tiny glimpses appear larger than they were. Most of "planet earth" didn't look like that, that most of the world burns. They were right, the "documentary" had increasingly become escapist television. The "reality TV" that is a fantasy of a world that isn't on the edge, that still safely harbors flora, breath, life, isn't choking. Securing some fantastical turf for the "natural" we ostracize to parks and behind 4k glass.
So maybe Lempert's moribund nostalgia is actually a sci-fi, of our present from the future, as it wrinkles and curls and blows out. Tragedy.


See too: Jochen Lempert at Between Bridges

Jochen Lempert at Between Bridges

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Taped like gift wrap to walls, the curling paper stresses the physical precariousness of silver held gelatin. Grain clinging like dust to paper; eyelashes etched into the silver they prevent from falling into the black iris behind it, which is poetic. The overt romance balanced not so much by an attachment to science, but just the basic desire to show: "Trained as a Biologist" it is easy to say that Lempert provides a sort of phenomenological augment to any scientific illustrativeness, that like Audubon who upset the world of avian illustration by depicting accurate birds in naturalistic motion (as opposed to the stuffed rigidity of classificatory diagram common to the time it) was realized you can learn two things about the world at once.