Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher at Clementine

Art in America, Jan, 2008 by Nancy Princenthal

Tiny surveillance cameras linked the niftily mirrored worlds of Reel to Reel, Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher's all-puns-intended installation. Placed inside the otherwise largely inaccessible interiors of two wall-mounted dioramas, and aimed at another pair of sometimes-kinetic contraptions, the cameras provided footage for a 10-minute black-and-white video projection that was the installation's central feature. Its imagery included what seemed to be a watery landscape seen from a low-flying airplane; a fiery sunset seen from behind a window; and a tile-floored interior with a steel table on which, intermittently, an old-fashioned tape recorder, and also a vintage turntable, were playing.

Figuring out how the installation worked meant realizing that most of these furnishings were dollhouse size. Similarly, the sunset was a matter of a pinpoint light moving slowly down a little translucent screen. On the other hand, the flyover landscape scene was created with a big revolving metal drum covered with an irregular pattern of green flocking; a stationary camera read its surface as a land of a thousand lakes. Even the quasi-musical soundtrack was produced in real time by wall-mounted (and full-scale) audio equipment, including four portable record players and a homemade string instrument vaguely resembling the insides of a miniature piano. Fleetingly, the platters spun and the strings were struck, but you had to dash around to catch them.

In fact, the pleasures of this installation mostly had to do with scuttling between the impressive but unforthcoming assemblages and the appealingly noir-ish video imagery. Just following the paths of the copious wiring as it ran across walls and ceiling, bristling with clusters of digital components and sometimes doubling back on itself in purely decorative redundancy, made you feel something like the magnetic tape in a reel-to-reel player--you found yourself circling from recording equipment to live output in a loop that made the present moment seem uncommonly elusive.

This is not altogether uncharted territory. Reel to Reel's closest precedent is Jon Kessler's epic 2005 installation at P.S.1, which pointed live-feed cameras out the building's windows as well as inward to a welter of moving elements. Sarah Sze's installations are relevant, too, for the delightful absurdities that result from their dense agglomerations of hardware-store miscellany. But Texas-based Shore and Fisher seem to have digested these lessons well, producing--in their first full-gallery New York exhibition--a work of admirable complexity and surprisingly affecting moodiness.--Nancy Princenthal

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