ORPHEUS X: Love as hellish agony. |
At the other end of the technological spectrum (with one notable exception) are the contributions to “Picture Show” at the Photographic Resource Center. There, relatively simple mechanical apparatuses — hand-turned gears, solar-powered motors, even an old-fashioned ViewMaster — are enlisted to varying degrees of artistic effect. The press materials for the exhibit describe its five contributors as artists who “engage the idea of the ‘moving picture,’ ” but I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. Erica von Schilgen, for instance, creates wall-mounted tableaux in which small, flat, metal figurines — a row of miniature arms reaching for a bed of flowers, a grid of antique-looking dolls — are set in motion by a system of cranks and pulleys, sometimes motorized, other times activated by hand. With a color palette reminiscent of Victorian postcards and a style suggestive of children’s-book illustrations, Schilgen’s confections aren’t about moving pictures so much as they are a variant on early mechanized toys.The same can’t be said of Steve Hollinger, who enlists sunlight to animate the psychologically charged images of what amount to motor-driven flipbooks. But not just any motor-driven flipbooks. Encased in weathered, wooden boxes or seen through a glass prism, Hollinger’s cartoons take on the aura of mythical personae, Sisyphus in particular. In Supercollider — imagine a pair of black, square binoculars with two tiny screens where the lenses should be — a man and a woman run toward each other and never meet. In Cenotaph, a hated male figure performs a dance with a sword against a backdrop of a mushroom cloud — all seen through a glass prism mounted on a square of concrete. Combining primitivism with advanced engineering, Hollinger creates silent dramas whose shrunken size is inversely proportionate to their emotional resonance and haunting appeal.
Hans Spinnerman’s unearthly projection of an albino bumblebee the size of a rodent wins the Houdini prize for its technological prowess and mysteriousness. Encased in an elaborate bell jar that looks as if it had come from a Jules Verne novel, Spinnerman’s bee hovers silently in pitch-black space, and no matter where you stand in relation to it, it’s always flying toward you.
LETTERDISC: Olivia Robinson stops short of seriousness. |
By comparison, for all their whimsy and craft, the efforts of Deb Todd Wheeler and Olivia Robinson feel more like exercises. In Wheeler’s Tubes, you spin a somewhat resistant wall-mounted wheel that generates the electricity required to light up four cardboard wall-mounted tubes that contain otherwise undetectable pictures. Unfortunately, only one of those tubes is near enough the wheel to be visible, so unless you’ve arrived with an able assistant, you can’t view the bulk of her creation. Olivia Robinson’s contributions — a ViewMaster disc with changing pictures of her face; a hand-cranked music box that plays a tune while a film on the inside shows her getting dressed; a refashioned fortune-telling eight ball that depicts, among other things, goldfish swimming in a bowl when you give it a shake — all stop short of the seriousness they could have allowed for.Last year, video artist Denise Marika made her theatrical debut by providing footage to Rinde Eckert’s Orpheus X, which enjoyed its world premiere at the Zero Arrow Theatre in Cambridge. This year, three enlarged and digitally manipulated stills from that footage make up her exhibit at the Howard Yezerski Gallery. Having missed Orpheus X in performance, I can’t compare the still photos with the movie from which they derive. I can say that the color photographs, with their Bosch-like torment and hints of deformity (a woman and a man struggle with each other in each of the 51-by-46-inch frames, and in one frame their wrestling limbs seemingly melt into each other’s bodies), offer a distinct if highly stylized impression of hellish agony. I’m not sure how the warring couple relates to the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, however. In the legend, Orpheus’s musicianship is so powerful and enchanting that Hades and Persephone agree to let him retrieve his beloved wife from the underworld (she was bitten by a poisonous snake) on the condition that he not look at her until they’d returned to earth. He does, and she’s lost to him forever.
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