Tony Oursler at Metro Pictures

I hadn't realized myself to be a Tony Oursler fan until I discovered that I've enjoyed works of his from the Milwaukee Art Museum and other museams. Metro Pictures hosted an ambitious exhibition of his recent work - massive 3D forms with complex projections.

The objects were intricately masked and secondary projectors threw background details on the environment. Each object held many eyes and mouths - watching, blinking, and speaking.



The video was altered and blended to feel something like clouds or mercury genetically melded with humans. You almost felt sorry for these amoeba-like creatures, frozen, still, and yet watching you and speaking pathetically as if a conversation might ensue.



To call myself a fan is too strong - rather I respect the work and was impressed and drawn in. It motivated my emotions and drew my empathy, but still the ugliness of it also repelled me.

The McCoy's at Postmasters

Postmasters continually shows interesting work - not always or even often appealing but very interesting media art. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's Directed Dreaming series touched on the boundaries of conceptually appealing and technically interesting.

The pieces move though mechanical rotation of scenes and backgrounds, observed by arching camera eyes and lit by blaring arched lights. The live video feeds are either projected on the wall or shown through small lcd screens.



The projections blur the line between live and recorded media. The feeds are live - but since they are tightly focused on the moving dioramas in front of them, they in fact play and endless loop of video.



The scenes observed by the camera reference 1950's idealism mixed with a surreal shifting of scale and blending of elements. The feeds in the largest piece are layered two sleeping occupants appear to dream the elements on the rotating disks before them. In the smaller projection piece the eight cameras switch between elements which seem tied into a single story occuring on the front and back of the installation.

Calder maquettes at Pace Wildenstein

Calder's works continue to attract me - from his mobiles and miniature animals to his giant public pieces. Pace Wildenstein exhibited a series of maquettes and small versions of his large scale works.

His simple palette of colors - primary and bold or black and white - and the shapes that somehow invite me to climb over them and slip between them - were striking in the gallery. Even the slightly vaulted ceiling of the place with its rivets and wood beams fit the work.



Perhaps some day I will make a mobile that feels as some of these do to me, or discover something in the shapes and edges of my work that feels this way.

Chelsea - March 2006 - sound and scent

This weekend Fura and I explored the Chelsea galleries. We started at Postmasters and wound our way through the district following descriptions we'd marked in Time Out.

Much of the work we most enjoyed came from the ones we chose based on curiosity rather than a sense of who the artist was. The most surprising of these is a scent and light installation by Charlotta Westergren at Bellwether Gallery (134 Tenth Ave).

A 30 second Quicktime of Charlotta Westergren's installation.

The scent was salty and floral and did permeate the space. She had worked with the scent technicians at West International to find a scent that matched her childhood memories of the Swedish Coast. The light in the hallway was red and the bulbs looked old, the space merged into a center room painted all white and diffusely lit so that nothing felt clear - like the soft wash of childhood memories.



At another gallery further uptown we found an odd installation of work the felt drawn from high school boredom sketched on the inside of notebooks and blown to fit the walls of a giant gallery. But some of the elements interested me - like this wobbly skinny impossible arm extending from the wall. It's fist clasped about a cord holding a filled paint bucket just above the floor. The temptation to reach out and swing the bucket was almost impossible to resist. And I found myself wondering if the elements did in fact have the weight they pretended.



Tucked in the back of the gallery, a video portrait of a man and a woman drowned just before you. The two screens focused on two people just below the surface of gently sussurating water. Their eyes blinked and they seemed to be exhaling, no matter how long you looked on.

An 8 second Quicktime of the video portrait.