Still motion

Afterimage, March-April, 2003 by Marisa S. Olson

Hosfelt Gallery

San Francisco, California

January 25-March 1, 2003

While motion detection, surveillance, GPS technologies, network structures and other such spatial devices and categories have dominated much of the criticism of contemporary media art, the theme of movement in visual art is not a new one. From the implied movement of a painter's body to the arrested motion of a photographer's subject, motion has long been a fascination. The work in the exhibition Still/Motion is emblematic of this varied and long art-critical tradition of privileging motion, extending its reach from LED panels, video and photography, to painting, sculpture and installation, while presented in the context of the inherence of motion to video and stillness to photography. In each case, motion comprises the work, yet the concept of motion and, often, motion contributed by the viewer, overrides the context and import of the original movement.

Aaron Parazette's paintings Slider and Site 1 (2002) are slickly clean images implying focused personal movement. The romantic notion of the line living as a trace of the painter's hand is updated by the reminder that motion implies space. The works marry motion and space in a formula akin to "rise over run," and their precise curvature demands motion of the viewer, too, if only ocular. Guy Hundere's video demands even more participation from the audience. Housed in a wooden box, one must flip a switch to activate Impasse (2001). Upon so doing, one sees what looks like an infinite car window tracking shot of a far-off barn house that never leaves center screen, despite the rapid movement of the foreground.

Kirsten Bahrs Janssen presents two more projects of the "red button" ilk. In this case, pressing the button activates wall sculptures that unravel or weave together spools of thread. The Length of DNA and How I Measured Up to the Moon (2003) does not, in fact, complete its task until its tiny motor has spun and twisted 69,544 spools of thread. This length is equivalent to estimations of both the length of a strand of DNA and the distance from the Earth to the Moon. While the latter piece will far exceed the artist's lifespan, Days of Sunshine in a Native Californian's Life (2001) presents a surprisingly meager 48 spools of yellow thread, to be unraveled in a conical pile, each representing one of the few sunny days in the life of the artist's mother. Just as time can be measured in relation to a person's lifespan, so too can motion. While the thread in use has a specific, physically-manifested length, stillness and motion are cast as cyclical, ephemeral qualities in Janssen's work.

In Westward (2003), Lordy Rodriguez created a fictional map representing a recent move from Texas to Los Angeles. At first glance, the map appears genuine. A carefully drawn grid and segments of various colors recall GPS technologies and topographic cartography, yet the viewer soon realizes that there is no decipherable logic to Rodriguez's details. An Etch-A-Sketch-like, indirect path is drawn, connecting starting point and destination, tying landscape to vision by virtue of the fact that those locales not visited are not seen by the viewer. At the exhibition's opening, visitors were convinced that the map represented a path traveled from West to East, as a Westerner would read a text, and that the piece documented a long road trip from California to New York. The Great Lakes were "recognized" in the Gulf of Mexico and the San Francisco peninsula was spotted off the coast of Los Angeles. Memory and the projection of human experience comprise the logic imparted to Westward by spectators.

Julianne Swartz's seemingly ramshackle, site-specific installations are similarly dependent upon a sense of spatial (mis)recognition, though her punch line is literally see-through. Lenses, wires, sheaths, adhesives, found objects and other sundry materials comprise gaze-directing armatures that are self-reflexive in their lookingness. Sparkly silver pinwheels spin and thin mylar tinsel twists in the wind as viewers are confronted with their own misinterpretation of the lens' ultimate vanishing point.

Rather than constructing a motion, Jona Frank meticulously tears several apart. Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge's early motion studies, Frank presents a video of young "star" skateboarder Cor-E skating next to four C-print panel contact sheets of the film strip on which he "moves." Actually the converse of Muybridge, who never saw his pictures in motion, Frank's skater, and the language of cinema, are deconstructed as vignettes to slowly reveal the many levels comprising Cor-E's motion. In the case of a segment in which the skater opens his mouth to bite on his skateboard, shaking his head as a dog would, it seems that the arrest of motion reveals the conceptual hinges between frames and reveals the very conception of the thought "chew skateboard." Despite their time-based medium, the Cor-E DVD (a 5245 analog transfer) and Filmstrips appear timeless in the absence of visual or auditory clues as to the year of the film's construction. As in previous works by the artist, her subject's clothing and physique are f undamentally demonstrative of his identity, yet they are so personally-stylized that he could just as easily be from 1975 as 2003. Again, invoking the temporal motion of cycles (the fashion system, lifespan, the state of current technologies), the context of skateboarding, with the waxing and waning of board, wheel, clothing and even movement styles within a specific constellation, proves the perfect backdrop for such a study.