Matthew Marks Gallery
522 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through June 23
The sculptor, photographer and occasional filmmaker Thomas Demand is back in Chelsea with new work in which normal-looking rooms are revealed as giant dioramas made entirely of paper — and then further exposed, by titles and news releases and other texts, as sites of malfeasance or calamity.
The photograph “Control Room,” for instance, purports to show the interior of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant during its tsunami-induced meltdown; it’s a no man’s land, made even less habitable by Mr. Demand’s conspicuous artifice.
Most intriguing is a very short (100-second) film, “Pacific Sun,” based on a YouTube clip of a cruise liner caught in a ferocious storm while traveling the Tasman Sea, which lies between Australia and New Zealand. Captured by a security camera in the boat’s cafe, the original footage shows tables, chairs and panicked voyagers being pitched from one side of the room to the other by the ship’s seesawing motion.
In Mr. Demand’s version, he omitted the people, as his photographs generally do. Working with animators, he reconstructed the cafe and recreated the movements of its contents (down to a falling ketchup bottle and a bobbing milk carton) in 2,400 frames. The result is convincing enough to make you seasick and, in concert with the Fukushima image, to instill a sense of powerlessness in the face of the ocean.
Yet there’s something stuntlike about the film; it could be an outtake from James Cameron’s “Titanic.” And the question of why this particular event (which resulted in injuries but no deaths) merits such meticulous attention is left unanswered. Mr. Demand may be exploring the idea that viral video sharing and continuous surveillance make disasters more accessible but less real.