
Rosa Barba, “Poised Compression”
In viewing photographs, we tend to look right through or past the photo itself, with all its elaborate technical background information, and imagine we are seeing the object in the picture as if it were actually present. In her piece “Poised Compression,” Rosa Barba short-circuits that impulse by constructing objects from movie machinery that she makes do things other than what they were intended to do. For example, a shadow box containing hanging loops of 35mm film draped over spools sits passively on the wall long enough to send its viewers looking elsewhere. Then, not unlike Banksy’s image of the girl with the balloon, which scandalized an auction house full of would-be collectors when it suddenly roared into action and shredded itself, concealed motors in “Poised Compression” suddenly start noisily spooling and un-spooling their burden of film, which tends to bring the audience scurrying back to see what’s happening. As the motors start, stop, and reverse they fill the box with looping coils of film that collaborate with gravity and interfere with each other to produce curvilinear graphics that grow, then shrink, form and reform unpredictably. Having watched the way film loops through a projector, the artist may want those who are used to seeing the motion picture but not what goes on behind the curtain to produce it, to have both in mind together. Or she may simply be tired of sphinx-like works of art that sit passively in the gallery and wait to be appreciated, sometimes for centuries.
Barba’s piece is part of Moving Pictures, at the Kimball Art Center until February 23 of 2025. The title is at least a triple pun, referring first of all to the art in the show having been created by artists who work, in various ways, with movies. Then there is the contrast with most gallery exhibitions, where the pictures do not move, while several of these do. And finally it is to be hoped that something here will move each viewer.

Iñaki Bonillas, “Los Ojos del Sol”
Some of what goes on in Moving Pictures might be described as inserting quotations from film into a work in another medium. Iñaki Bonillas’s “Los Ojos del Sol” doubles such a physical pun with a literal play on words. His analytical and diagrammatic series of prints includes a progressively more complex breakdown of 15 squares that proceed from an idea of Sol Lewitt’s, to wit “straight lines in four directions and all their possible combinations.” The two readings of Bonillas’s title, which translates to either “The Eyes of the Sun” or “The Eyes of Sol (Lewitt),” are connected by inserted images of eyes that are stills taken from well-known films like Psycho that made unforgettable use of closeups of various cast member’s eyes.
One thing to consider about Moving Pictures is the sophistication of its connections between the cinematic sources and the works presented. Each benefits from taking a moment to become familiar with the individual artist’s sources and intentions, and the time spent looking is augmented by time spent reading the accompanying texts. Matthew Barney’s six highly refined etchings based on material from his film Redoubt, which etchings depict both landscape scenery and mechanical devices, have been ornamented with electro-chemically induced copper nodules and two-tone frames in a very sophisticated process that makes them curiosities in themselves; but getting to know them better would be hard to do without further research.
Lisa Oppenheim’s suggestive black-and-white (or black-and-silver) textures begin in experiments with prototypical photographic materials. Just as the movies can carry an audience back in time, her exploration of chemical history reconnects us with a prior age, before digital approaches separated filmmaking from the necessity of inventing physical means of telling stories. Several artists play with the distance between the moving picture and the reality of its being essentially a series of still pictures shown briefly to produce an illusion that they’re in motion. Still images that evoke the narrative poses and postures of film are one way to see how movies work, and Alex Prager has even played with using the same materials in both still and moving pictures to explore and highlight the differences.

Lisa Oppenheim, “Photograph of Nitrate Film Vault Test, Beltsville Maryland Fire Pattern (1949/2019) (Version II)”

Sky Hopinka, “Mnemonics of Shape and Reason”
Two contrasting narratives are much in the news these days. One is the welcome story of progress made in the struggle for Indigenous People’s rights, while the other is about the determination of politicians and their supporters to reverse such trends. Because the Kimball builds its own exhibitions, rather than serving as a stop on a traveling show, like musicians going from place to place, its schedules don’t always entirely match up. Since the opening of Moving Pictures, the Kimball has been able to add “Mnemonics of Shape and Reason,” a film by Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. Like many artists, Hopinka has created his own visual and sonic syntax, but one he says makes intuitive sense to his people in a way different from that employed by filmmakers from a European or even an International tradition. In a sense, he has inverted the history wherein the native people of a place have an alien language imposed on them, which they must learn to interpret if they are to participate in their larger lives. Hopinka instead presents his story of a place he visited in a moving—in both senses—picture that outsiders will want to ask him to share. Seeing the often quite magical landscape of Utah, including secret places like “Soaking Mountain,” through the eyes not of tourists, but of those who dwell in them, can only enrich ones feeling for the land.
The most compelling work in Moving Pictures is Gary Hill’s “Loop Through,” in which two mysteriously similar yet different images of the great actress Isabelle Huppert are displayed side-by-side. At first they may look like still pictures, but then she abruptly moves. At times the two seem like mirror images, while at others the twin versions appear to part ways. It’s clear that two cameras are employed, simultaneously filming the same figure from different angles. The almost hypnotic result allows the subject’s powerful presence her full impact, but as she seems to go in and out of sync with herself, the mind struggles to imagine just how her presence achieves such magnetic force. This is where art began and still begins: in the mental effort to reconcile overwhelming sensual information into a workable model of the world around us.

Gary Hill’s “Loop Through”
Moving Pictures, Kimball Art Center, Park City, through Feb. 23.
All images courtesy the author.
Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts