Kristin Lucas at Postmasters

Kristin Lucas takes technology personally. In her split-screen video Involuntary Reception (2000), she presented herself as an overcharged technophile who found it almost impossible to function in the world due to excessive sending and receiving of electromagnetic signals. For more than a decade now, Lucas has been creating cautionary tales about the perils of technology, devising media-based performances in which she casts herself in the central role of a forlorn young woman for whom the seductions of technology lead to isolation and severe physical and psychic contamination. Not one for gore, however, Lucas seduces with humor and pathos.

Her two-room installation at Postmasters represented a significant leap for this 39-year-old artist. The front space held a three-screen video work (two plywood billboard surfaces used as projection screens and one old computer lying on the floor) about a woman who works in an airport casino, somewhere in the Southwest, calling Bingo numbers. The woman (played by Lucas) drives herself into the desert after strange rashes start appearing on her body, and also seeks the aid of a hypnotherapist in her search for revitalization.

Lucas films herself in the relentlessly empty and sunny landscape as if she were a lone ranger. She stands, solitary, dressed in her Bingo shirt, staring out at the vast stretches of land, occasionally shielding her eyes from the sun's glare and the steady desert wind. A doleful, minimal score by Geoffrey Morris elicits our intense sympathy for Lucas's character. The two plywood screens (their surfaces sinewy with wood grain), placed diagonally adjacent to each other, were surrounded by fiberglass rocks and acrylic comets tossed, like toys, on the floor. The clearly surreal atmosphere (a desert where fallen comets are right at home) bespeaks the artist's playfulness.

Next to one of the rocks lay the computer screen displaying the hypnotherapy sessions. There is "no emotional need to feel sad," the therapist tells her, even as the oozing sores on her face and limbs grow worse. The sores, it turns out, function as antennae for receiving Bingo numbers. They disappear when she stands tall in the desert alone. While echoing the performative work of Valie Export and Lynn Hershman Leeson, Lucas here establishes herself as a mature artist in full control of a complex narrative.

On the wall opposite the projections were hung three digitally enhanced photographs in lightboxes, each related metaphorically to the saga of the skin-scourged woman. In one, Travel Advisory (2006), the artist's eyes, rendered in a metallic blue, are popping, and her head is surrounded by a halo, as if she were the protomartyr of the technosphere.

In the back room, Lucas hung the transcript of her appearance before the Superior Court of Alameda County, Calif., where she attempted to "refresh" herself (like the computer command) by applying for a name change. The name she wanted was the name she already had, Kristin Sue Lucas; she only wanted to "refresh" it officially. The multi-page Q & A between Lucas and the mensch of a judge, Frank Roesch, totally serious and totally enchanting, is available on the Postmasters Web site.

Sharing the same space were works by 21 artists whom Lucas asked to create portraits of her before and after her name change. Of most interest were two haunting inkjet prints by Cristobal Lehyt and a multiply-manipulated surveillance-style video by Will Pappenheimer.

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