No relation to Uri as far as I know, still, Finnish born Jiri Geller certainly knows how to bend minds which is far more a useful power than bending cutlery, any day. Is it Pop Art, are there Koonsian influences going on in Jiri's work? Who knows and who cares, all you need to know is, in the immortal words of Cilla, "it's a lorra lorra fun." A dead Mickey Mouse, an escalator to nowhere, and a frozen wave, what more could you ask for?
Geller is faking out the fakers in our lives, like a carefully played double-bluff he's spring cleaning the misnomers in visual perception, and generally giving our long term memories a kick up the proverbial backside. His subjects and works are like a dream caught within a plastic dream, plenty of Disney references, some simple abstracts, and the occassional life-size slice of bizarro world, an escalator to nowhere is but one of them.
His objects juxtapose our reliance on the perceptual comfort and security of materialism and material existence, with that almost jaw-dropping moment when time slows to a stop, be it panic, wonder, shock, it comes to us all from time to time. Geller's whole collection is like an anarchist's time capsule collection, objects guaranteed to excite a future race in the short term, yet ultimately depress them with the futility of it all once they've taken the long view.
Don't fall off, corporeal reality is slippery at the best of times.
