ART REVIEW: SMOKE & MIRRORS: KEVIN COOLEY AT LANEY CONTEMPORARY IN SAVANNAH
Burnaway
May 2018
By Lisa Jaye Young
“Los Angeles artist Kevin Cooley has created an atmospheric, tweet-activated installation at Laney Contemporary in Savannah that marks the constant slippage of time — time at the speed of sea levels rising and polar caps melting. The indirectly participatory work is engaged every time anyone, anywhere, tweets the hashtags #smokeandmirrors, #climateaction, or #ecofriendly, that real-time Twitter text is projected into a mirrored room filled with a dense fog emitted by visibly low-tech fog machines that hiss continuously in the corners. Each tweet — such as “pipeline spills raw crude,” “eco-housing demanded,” “trees help fight climate change,” “Trump kills NASA’s carbon monitoring,” and “increase of UV radiation in the arctic” — is like a ticking clock, indicating the passage of time as climate concerns mount and we collectively do nothing to stop it.”