http://www.pittsburghpulp.com/content/2004/02_19/arts_art.shtml
The
Female Form
Six women artists reveal themselves in digital media
allure electronica
Wood Street Galleries, Downtown
Through March 6 2004
412.471.5605
BY ALICE WINN
The digital world can be a
space into which we project bodily desires or rational plans, or it can be a
realm where infinite combinations of imagery play freely. As electronic arts
interact with the senses in increasingly inclusive ways, human experience is
being extended further into the domain of media. Here, artists may imagine
topographies of relations that transgress those of the physical world. Yet
technology, old or new, always has to do with the earthbound body and thus with
gender. At Wood Street Galleries, six female artists imagine and articulate the
subversive alliance between woman and machine. allure electronica, their
show of installations and photographs informed by digital media, feels
extremely fluid. It reveals them as aware of but indifferent to masculine
principles of order, seeking a connection between the feminine and the digital
where both become something else in the process.
Andrea Ackerman's Rose
Breathing is part of a series of synthetic landscapes created from
computer-manipulated video images. Ackerman uses the floral symbol of female
freshness and freedom to present a moving, visual archaeology of a single
bodily gesture. Inhaling and exhaling in a layered series of complex sounds and
sights, her immense, translucent flower creates a dynamic interface between
exterior and interior. Its perfect exhibition of physiological rhythm
metaphorically demonstrates that perceiving experience as aesthetic requires an
understanding of the harmonic relations between the self and its environment.
Modern sociologists have
come to argue that society no longer exists. We live instead within networks,
with economies, populations and cultures as nodal points of a global process of
endless flows. The secure categories of the traditional world also appear to be
in flux within Lillian Ball's video projections of active water over cast,
mirrored glass. This potent symbol of fluidity, clarity and power here
parallels the flow of thought, of life, of time, of electrical signals, while
also becoming a metaphor for bodily experience. In Boiling Point, moving
images of the slowly bubbling liquid provoke spontaneous, contradictory
responses of contemplation and tension. At the edge of its liberation into air,
the transitional substance here transcends the rigidities and vulnerability of
contained objects. Floating Worlds references the Buddhist concept of
the fleeting nature of earthly existence. Ball sets her illusionary realms in
the midst of the fugitive and infinite spiraling of water down three kitchen
sink drains. In these sanctuaries of artifice and futility, the sounds of
incessantly moving water make a space for impotent triumph. Yet the work also
suggests the fluidity of the imaginary and its refusal to be subsumed in a
fixed and closed symbolic realm.
Nancy Dwyer explores the
most interactive thing of all -- language. She mixes messages from analog and
digital worlds to create another logic for this one. Her work is a subtle
evocation of the way language orders our bodies and minds, where orders
has the double meaning of enforcement and sense. Pieces are full of hints and
suggestions that register and disappear, generating their own narratives that
still seem somehow concrete. One must search for subliminal clues in the spaces
between an arrangement of pixel-like, painted, sculptural balls in order to
find the hidden phrase Selfish Idiot. Each installation holds another
belief made transparent and mirage-like. These incoherent insights at the edge
of consciousness stand as signs of what cannot be repressed or alienated.
Julia Heyward's interactive
video projection Miracles in Reverse presents over 75 scenes with
multiple characters and paths that viewers can follow. The work consists of
loops that allow visitors to manipulate vividly staged incidents from the
artist's life at varying speeds and in differing directions. Participants may
use the aesthetics of the piece's interface to frustrate memory and play with
sensory and emotional responses. Traveling with Heyward along her flights of
mind and associative connections, we are derailed and thrown back and forth across
time. The work thereby constructs a cyclical narrative that opposes a stifling
linear time frame.
This alternating temporal
structure reconstructs the past as a force that affects present life. The cycle
is not simply a set track on which a determined course of events will forever
circle like a broken record. Instead it unwinds a film that resists closure,
because, like organic forms, it forever defies the laws of a logic that could
stabilize it. Viewers wander over the story lines with a mouse as with a
virtual hand. Clicking the button shifts the images along, revealing fragments
of personal diaries. By allowing users to choose the viewpoint, a single story
space can turn into myriad experiences, each one tailored to the preferences of
an individual. This selection process allows viewers to gain access to
characters' thoughts and to use them as a contextual lens for interpreting
events in the story. Moreover, the notion of multiple viewpoints reflects our
increasingly global society that keeps us constantly aware of the many
different cultures and perspectives on life. In one scene we watch flames
flicker into doves as if we're enrapt in a collective dream that has formed our
common understanding of what is possible and our fantasies of what we wish were.