Curating silence

Afterimage, May-June, 2005 by Vanessa Rocco

The Space Beyond Silence

MediaNoche

New York, New York

February 10-March 3, 2005

For such a tiny installation, "The Space Beyond Silence," at MediaNoche, a fairly new and innovative space located in Spanish Harlem, succeeded in commenting on media, perception and how curatorial decisions inflect the experience of an exhibition. The curator, Monica Nunez Laiseca, asked six artists of diverse cultural backgrounds to create multi-media installations that incorporated both the concept of silence and the gallery space itself. In the artist panel organized as part of the exhibition, Laiseca named two texts as her primary sources for the concept of the exhibition--texts that were given to the artists as departure points for their site-specific projects. The first was a fragment from Walter Benjamin's One Way Street (1926) in which he ponders the distance, or lack of, between perceiver and object--how the viewer projects themselves onto that which is perceived sensually.

The second was Bill Viola's "A Portrait in Light and Heat" (1979), where he longs for a place free from references or urban distractions as the ideal place to utilize his camera. The impossibility of Viola's quest conveys the tension between the advance of modern technology and the desire for privacy and quiet contemplation, a tension that runs through each of the works in the exhibition.

The viewer was immediately led toward the pieces by an intentional lack of wall text or individual labels. On the front wall was a large diagram of the interior space of the gallery, with the names of the six artists written as a spatial guide to the location of their works. Laiseca's professed aim in doing away with text was to encourage viewers to interact with the work alone, without an overload of external distraction or information, and thus allow perception of the work to become a strictly sensory experience. Considering this emphasis, the largest piece, Shh, a collaboration between Helen Dennis, a young British artist, and the duo of La Manga (Gabriela Medina and Mario Villa), established performance artists/choreographers from Mexico, was the most successful. Dennis first produced photographic drawings of activity seen through the three tall windows in MediaNoche's space over the course of a few days. She layered sketches of these activities onto mylar and transformed these into negatives by exposing them to photosensitive paper. She then developed them as three huge photographs the same size as the floor-to-ceiling windows. La Manga then produced a silent video performance, a composite of monochromatic colors, geometric lines and abstracted bodily movement, that was projected onto the black and white photographic drawings. Its effect was a seductive visual experience as the slow-moving projection unfolded on the background of the dynamic photographs and overtook them, negating the frenetic activity with simplified, essential forms. Another engaging work, Interferences, produced by Australian Eileen Mack, was a guided meditation in front of a computer screen involving subtle, evolving sounds, like that of a refrigerator humming. Such mundane sounds were surprisingly tranquil out of context, reminiscent of the white noise that normally recedes from human consciousness, particularly in the sensory onslaught of our contemporary world. The viewer-participant could add further sounds by speaking, coughing or humming into a microphone, with the resulting sounds being immediately translated into the program.

Two other pieces seemed to be more about interrupting the technologies that prevent silence than about the excavation of pure sensory experience. One was a startling exercise in "Surveillance Art" (its own category now) by Canadian Jamie Allen. The viewer appeared on a small security screen and by dialing a given number with their cell phone could interrupt the signal and fragment their own image, deflecting the prying eyes of the camera. The other was a video performance by Korean artist Yoona Kang, taped in the gallery space, in which Kang dons a costume reminiscent of the murderer in Brian De Palma's film Dressed to Kill (1980), applying makeup, sunglasses and wig and emerging as an aggressive personality even without speech. She then simulates ingesting a "technology soup"--replete with a cell phone. This piece seemed self-conscious and too aware of other performative works for the camera, such as Cindy Sherman's photographs, and did not foster thoughts on the shifting definitions of silence or the utilization of the senses as deeply as the other work.

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Laiseca, who is in the United States from Spain on a Fulbright scholarship, undertook the exhibition for her Master's thesis at the New York University Museum Studies program, and MediaNoche should be applauded for supporting aspiring curators in this manner. The space, a small gallery funded by a grant from the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, opened as a digital lab in 2003 to teach residents of Spanish Harlem how to make films and use new media. Now MediaNoche is making itself a promising outlet for experimental curating as well. "The Space Beyond Silence" is presented as part of "Place," a year-long series of exhibitions that explore the role of technologies in transcultural experience.