“Home Invasion” by Amanda Moore
Scopophilia, the inborn love of looking, and espionage, making war with the eyes, are neither identical nor mutually exclusive activities. Voyeurs, who seek the scurrilous and scandalous, can be found at both ends of the spectrum, and so can artists. Operation Salt, a loose association of (currently) ten artists who meet monthly to advance their shared interests in experimenting with media, has taken over the fourth floor gallery at the Main Library for an aesthetic presentation of some of the more political issues, in both the broad and narrow senses of “political,” facing society today.
It comes as no surprise that mechanical problems continue to beset exhibitions of new media. “Surveillance Footage,” a video by Laina Thomas, was inexplicably shut off on the day we visited. Winston Inoway’s illustration, “Fresh Values,” was identified by a wall tag but couldn’t be located—perhaps the most trenchant overall comment on surveillance. The remaining works vary both in aesthetic quality and their success in making their points, without any relationship between the two measures becoming apparent. For example, Eugene Tachinni presents two large wall pieces that feature dramatic and effective designs made with tape. One, “Moral Issue,” is a number of very large circles divided by one of the structural pillars that support the library building. In the other, “Preserving and Strengthening,” an irregular polygon of tape surrounds several large sheets of paper hung like a tablet—joined at the top but otherwise free while overlapping. Both are clearly meant to address the current controversy over the precise nature of marriage: apparently to comment on its role in uniting some and dividing others. Such works are often said to preach to the choir, but in Tachinni’s case it was impossible to tell with any certainty what his sermon meant to say. Instead, it can be interpreted to support whatever position on the issue the viewer already holds. Additionally, there is a dissonance between the many signs asking viewers not to touch the works and the need to lift the sheets of paper comprising “Preserving . . . ” in order to see what makes up the ghost image visible through the top sheet.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that the works that most reliably deliver a sense of an artist in control of her effects are among the more conventional. Erin Esplin’s diorama, “Oblivious,” turns viewers to voyeurs as they gaze through a glass window into a box and find themselves watching a woman taking a bath. Here the artist makes a far clearer, if also more obvious, connection between art and the ethical issues surrounding privacy. Grace Ashby’s witty paintings include “I See You, I Smell You, Now Kiss Me,” consisting of four square panels hung in a larger square, each covered with a thick layer of paint through which a trompe l’oeil facial feature appears to protrude. “Pear–amount Invasion” a surreal fantasia on historical images of war and bombing, points up the futility of placing observers in the path of events they can’t do anything about. In the gallery’s corner, her “Watcher,” a painted stand-up figure of a man in business suit-and-binoculars, points up the mundane, if not exactly banal, nature of the act.
“After the Armistice” by Paul Stout
Paul Stout’s three small sculptures, enclosed in vitrines, are each a small planet supported by a base the massive size of which emphasizes the little world’s vulnerability. “Genetic Erosion” is planted in one continuous, spiraling furrow to emphasize the ongoing reduction in species variability. “For Another Night of Warmth” finds a tent pitched in the tiny remaining clearing on an icy world. The world of “After the Armistice” is a cratered wasteland on which a few trees valiantly still stand. A more ambiguous comment on nature can be seen in three more paintings by Erin Esplin that play on the tendency of birds to seem to—or actually to—stand on man-made structures and watch us. Her vulpine birds favor wires that may carry telephone or cable signals, while the dripped and scribbled skies behind them hint at uncertain messages.
Artists are expected to have edgy personalities, but among Utah’s largely complacent artists Amanda Moore stands out as one who takes no aesthetic prisoners in pursuit of showing just how things truly are. Her four large images employ voluptuous commercial product photography on peripheral items that aren’t usually subjected to such glorification, so that the suspicions she raises about commodity, security, and privacy are referred back to the ideas of consumption and consumer values. Anyone who has ever received a credit card solicitation from a strange bank that somehow knows his private financial affairs can appreciate the threat behind these real-looking but blank cards. And while many of us carry a bar code-marked convenience tag on our keys, how many of us have noticed that the directions on the back instruct finders of lost keys to return them to the merchant?|2|Moore has even put her own credit card in a microwave to show how the electronic chip under the hologram reacts.
David Baddley’s two mural-sized prints from film exposed to airport X-ray machines make for more abstract photography, while pointing out the risks to more than just vacation snaps. It wasn’t that long ago that the adverse health effects of medical X-rays were controversial, but any progress made in that direction was long ago lost to the invasive use of electro-magnetic radiation for prying into non-medical questions. Baddley’s vast images resemble Mark Rothko’s black paintings, but instead of faith find only visual noise.
To my mind, Kristina Lenzi’s video, “Coffee and a Cigarette,” shows why video continues to be both a prolific and a marginal medium. Evidently a surveillance video, shot from above, of a man innocently consuming the title items, it mates either a rich or an annoying—depending on taste—sound track of eavesdropped conversations with a grainy image that Andy Warhol would have made last for hours. Although possessing a certain power to make aesthetic an event that otherwise defies interest, such works make their admittedly valid points in seconds, but go on interminable. The questions then arises: why not a conventional work, such as a painting, that uses the maker’s skill in selecting one key moment and presents that for contemplation, rather than a plethora of succeeding instants that attempt the same effect but end up numbing the viewer’s senses?
“W(hole)” by Shasta Fletcher
The most ambitious piece in Surveillance is “W(hole),” an elaborate and interactive sculpture installation by Shasta Fletcher that initially confronts the viewer with a life-sized, photographic image of a pregnant woman parting her clothing to display her swollen belly. A red and gold mandala and a wooden frame surround her, marking off a private space that can be entered visually through the veil that covers where her face would otherwise be. Looking through this gauze portal one sees ones a clock face of 12 men and women’s faces surrounding a mirror. In the mirror are reflected the back of the mandala—on which appear a pair of collage-modified copies of the Last Supper, one inverted below the other—and the viewer’s own eyes, peering though the hold voyeuristically. Red yarns keep the anatomical allegory in mind, threading through the interior space and spilling from the woman’s navel. Fletcher has chosen not to enclose her work in the manner of its ancestor, Marcel Duchamp’s “Etant Donnés,” thereby forcing viewers to explore its complexities entirely through its title orifice. Perhaps she’s chosen instead to take mercy on viewers by allowing limited entry into the “backstage” area, where this rich and variegated presentation of the human sexual circus can be more completely surveilled.
Fletcher reminds us that the root of “surveillance” must lie in moving beneath the veil. Whether that veil is the skin that covers our body or the privacy of our relationships, it’s an irony of our time that at the very moment when privacy struggles to become established in law, it is attacked with new vehemence by forces of social reaction. Those who share the notion that art, whether or not it can change anything, ought to at least comment on such matters will find a visit to the library even more meaningful than usual from now until September 13.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
