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September 29, 2014 – Review
“Slide Slide Slide”
Genevieve Yue
The slide projector last appeared in pop cultural consciousness on the television period drama Mad Men. Don Draper, pitching a fictional ad campaign to Kodak executives, clicks through a carousel filled with own family photos: his head leaning against his wife’s pregnant belly, his daughter sitting atop his shoulders. The poignancy of these slides is underscored by the knowledge that Don’s family life is falling apart. Nostalgia, he explains, means the pain of an old wound. The carousel is “a time machine… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
The carousel’s nostalgic twinge appears in “Slide Slide Slide,” an exhibition of slide projection works and related performances at New York’s Microscope Gallery. Older viewers will recognize the stout plastic machines from their childhood homes and classrooms. They are less familiar for younger audiences, for whom slide projectors have been replaced by their digital counterparts. This is evident in Bruno Munari’s Untitled (1, 2, 3) (1952), slide sculptures that, because of their curled ribbons that extend from the flat slide frame, are too delicate to be exhibited in a projector. In their place, images of the multifocal works are digitally projected as visual documents. Joel Schlemowitz’s A …