|
It's always a pleasure when a group show contains
the work of diverging artists who share a sensibility that lends
a strong unifying quality to the theme. This exhibition at Parker's
Box follows the excellent Up in Arms show, which deservedly
received a lot of attention for its timely look at the gun in
contemporary art and culture. In this case, the theme is Grounds,
which uses the premise of terrain to investigate the correlation
between real environments and the imagination. This notion refers
more to the territorial confines of the mind (J.G. Ballard calls
it inner space) but references real landscape in the process.
This comparison of inner landscape to reality is not an obvious
theme but asks to what degree do we impose fiction over fact.
Here it is almost completely site-specific and illustrated extraordinarily
well in three distinct ways. Most effective is Caroline McCarthy's
video installation, Autumn, a dual projection that gives
a rat's eye view of haphazard movement along a gutter or mini-alley.
One feels a bit like a roller skate on the loose. Scale and motion
are used to convey this, but the main concern is to remind us
how reality forms the backdrop of fiction. The narrative (road
movie?) is open ended, implied. The split image projected into
a corner creates a visual stereo that seems to jump, echoing the
terrain.
Inner space has always been a fixture of fiction
and the novel, but now these "environments" are given
greater and greater say in the look of films. The detailed high-tech
backdrops of the sword and sorcery genre has developed into more
and more complex worlds like that depicted in Lord
of the Rings or The Matrix,
where every detail is illustrated. Not a lot is left to the imagination
there, but in this case there is pause to consider it. Is this
the space where a child makes a game out of every environment?
Cribbed from cartoons, Ravi Rajakumar's
Still takes images from TV and removes the context in a
step by step way. These terrains began as painted backdrops created
by animators to be shot for film. They become the worlds that
animated creatures inhabit. Then they are projected as video and
broadcast as cartoons on TV for years and years. Rajakumar finally
photographs them at a rare gap in the action and presses "pause."
This process pulls new images out of a familiar scape that has
been taken for granted. This odd yet familiar space is now empty,
missing the Roadrunner or whatever character usually ran through
it. The results create a nowhere, a nothing, which is oddly soothing
and full of some anticipation at the same time.
Ezra Parzybok's work is familiar in a different
way, perhaps because this sort of small installation of household
objects is common these days. The floor piece,
Temple District, is a combination of everyday objects such
as matchbooks, color swatches, and golf pencils that are used
in a "house of cards" sort of construction that creates
facsimiles of miniature cities and mock model architecture. The
larger floor piece brings to mind a train set scale without the
inherent kitsch element. It has a wonderful immediacy that makes
it appear as if it was produced minutes before. There is a fragility
that is effective but the pieces are in danger of becoming slight.
All the work in Grounds has an element
of childhood memory to it, fanciful but with added purpose. The
works mesh and seem to define a contemporary situation very much
taken for granted, the underlying tendency to make a daydream
out of every waking moment.
-James
Rosenthal, June, 2003
|
