![]() ![]() ![]() Others maneuver the camera’s optical and technical controls, creating clever visual puzzles that toy with our understanding of space, scale, and distance. Many of the artists use photography in combination with painting, drawing, or sculpture, fabricating subjects to be recorded by the camera. The majority of works included in this exhibition date from 1970 to the present. That relationship, as understood in photographs, is not always obvious.” “Seeing and believing have important correlations that impact our notions of truth and reality. and Mary Louise Blackwell CEO & Director of the Nelson-Atkins. “The photographs in Art of Illusion provide engaging opportunities to consider the ways we form our perceptions of the world through photographs,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, Menefee D. Art of Illusion: Photography and Perceptual Play, curated by April Watson, is comprised of more than 50 photographs from the museum’s permanent collection, many of them recent acquisitions and never before on view. 28, 2021– Does photography accurately reflect the things we see? Or does it merely present illusions? Those are the central questions explored in an exhibition opening this fall at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. ![]() The Art of Illusion is not without pleasures but it does lack the confidence and lightness of touch that might make Michalik’s play fly.Art of Illusion Photography Exhibition Challenges Adage ‘Seeing is Believing’ And the cast do decent work with their fast-rotating roles, particularly Bettrys Jones as the more-than-she-seems victim of thievery, and Rina Fatania mining her various bit parts fruitfully for eccentric humour. That said, I enjoyed getting better acquainted with these vignettes from entertainment history. Increasingly, too, it begins to feel as if, behind the intricate construction and his relish for circularities and coincidences as his history of French illusion unfolds, Michalik’s play doesn’t add up to much. The actual magic tricks (skills hastily acquired in the rehearsal room, we must assume) understandably lack panache. The relationship with the audience, and the rough-theatre performance style, feels half-baked. Unlike successful magicians, though, it’s not slick or skilled enough to pull that off. It’s a show that styles itself, like stage magicians tend to, as all-knowing and forever a step ahead of its audience. Mysterious … Martin Hyder as the Watchmaker. He orchestrates the shifts between 1844, when Robert-Houdin (after whom Houdini named himself) buys himself a theatre 1888, when the bootmaker’s son Georges turns the same venue into a proto-cinema and 1984, when romance blossoms between a thief and a woman whose bag he stole on the Paris Metro. We’re lured into Tom Jackson Greaves’s production by the mysterious Watchmaker (Martin Hyder), an immortal spirit of magic who pops up throughout the several story strands. Its Frenchness feels intact, mind you: it’s a jeu d’esprit that, like many a magic show, diverts from moment to moment but offers you very little to hang on to. Alexis Michalik’s time-hopping The Art of Illusion – a hit in France as Le Cercle des Illusionnistes – has now been translated for the UK stage by playwright Waleed Akhtar ( The P Word). A matter of weeks after being delighted and confounded by Derren Brown, I’m very much here for a theatrical deep-dive into the history of illusion that takes in the “Mechanical Turk”, the magic pioneer Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and the trailblazer in early cinema Georges Méliès. ![]()
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