Meridel Rubenstein at LewAllen Contemporary - Santa Fe - Brief Article

Nautical imagery in contemporary art is often used to evoke forced migrations and political exile. In Meridel Rubenstein's most recent installation, from a work-in-progress titled "Joan's Arc/Vietnam," the artist adroitly brings a renewed immediacy to this familiar imagery by depicting boats and sea travel with a striking diversity of techniques. The new work, which is focused on the Vietnam War and its aftermath, continues the sociopolitical and environmental concerns that have occupied Rubenstein for over 20 years. (Some of her previous projects have explored lowrider subculture, the San Ildefonso Indians of New Mexico and the development of the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos.)

Although contained within a single small room, this compact installation, which included video, photographs, sculpture and texts, was surprisingly complex. Two small 19th-century wooden dugouts sat on pedestals at the installation's entrance. Visible inside each boat was a translucent photograph made by laminating film emulsion between long rectangular pieces of glass. The photographs are group portraits that unite participants from both sides of the conflict as well as their descendents. The installation's centerpiece was an overhead audio-video projection that was simultaneously reflected in a mirrored surface on the floor. It showed underwater marine scenery of colorful undulating vegetation that was intermittently broken up by silvery ocean surfaces bubbling with light, shards of sky, and glimpses of a beach and the prow of a ship. The video was also poignantly punctuated by a drowning evoked in a recurrent sequence of a hand seen grasping for a rope, and then floating inertly. Accompanied by the sound of lapping water and periodically disrupted by muffled voices or bursts of jagged sound, the projection spurred a sense of both anxiety and release.

On opposing walls of the room, large-scale amber-tinged prints of majestic indigenous trees from the U.S. faced similar depictions of ancient and sacred trees from Vietnam and Cambodia. Printed on coarse bark paper coated with ground mica, the slightly warped photographs, despite their somewhat confrontational juxtaposition, provided the most contemplative aspects to the installation. Light caught in their granular surfaces, occasionally accented with washes of yellow-oranges, aquamarines or violets from vegetable pigments, lent a subtle radiance and mythical presence to the trees. As one viewed the installation from different angles, the transparency of the works on glass allowed light and shadow and surrounding imagery to momentarily coalesce on their surfaces. In those instants, Rubenstein's ephemeral, multimedia collage suggested nothing less than a harmonious coexistence of disparate elements and cultures.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group