Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,
This week, Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee writes about the exhibition “A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS,” which is on display now through Sunday, November 22, 2020.
A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS is an exhibition of a sculpture, a film, and a survey of six recent video works presented in a nontraditional, temporal framework in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. Rather than present all of the included artworks every day the exhibition is open, the sculpture is up for the run of the exhibition, the film is being projected three times, and the videos are projected one at a time for two weeks each. Instead of an eight-person exhibition there are in effect six different two-person presentations. As the videos will not be seen in the same place at the same time, they will exist in relation to each other only through memory, engaging one of the fundamental properties of the moving image in the structure of the exhibition itself.
Upon entering the front doors of the gallery you see the smallest work, the sculpture. Nestled into a custom-built atrium in a corner of the gallery, Peter Fischli & David Weiss’ Son et lumière (1990) acts as the pivot or fulcrum for the entire exhibition, the kinetic center around which everything else revolves.
Acting as a counterweight, a proto-cinematic object, and a foil, the sculpture is the smallest work included in the exhibition and is given the most time in the gallery. Like most works by Fischli & Weiss the materials list is simple: “Projection with kinetic objects including an army torch (fitted with red and green gels), turntable, corrugated plastic beaker and adhesive tape.” While the materials are self-evident, the effect they create is magical. The turntable is propped up on an angle by a few coins placed under one end and as it rotates the plastic cup rolls around the turntable surface guarded by a masking tape fence. The light from the flashlight refracts through the cup creating a projection on the wall behind making a gentle rhythmic sound as it moves.
Turning the corner into the main space of the gallery there is carpeting over the cork tile floor and a large-scale projection wall dividing the vaulted space. The videos are projected here in a darkened space. Works are included by Renée Green ’81, Karrabing Film Collective, Trisha Baga, Stanya Kahn, Arthur Jafa, and Charlotte Prodger. More information about each of the works can be found on the exhibition website. Individually these works address continuities, discontinuities, place, and displacement in time. They connect a deep mystical time to the present tense, visualize cycles, and reach into the future for the potential it may hold for transformation.
Tacita Dean’s 16mm film The Green Ray (2001), also included in the exhibition, refers to a naturally-occurring phenomenon, a flash of green light crossing the sky after the sun has set. In the 19th century it was a widely-held Romantic belief in Europe that observing the green ray gave the viewer a heightened perception of the world and viewing the ray was indicative of a coming transformation. In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), the green flash is seen as a sign that a soul has returned to the living. Jules Verne encapsulated that ideal in his 1882 novel The Green Ray referring to the color as “the true green of Hope”. In her collected writings, Dean explains that “looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see.” The green ray grounds the temporal framework of the exhibition itself and the specificity of media’s relation to time, delineating difference of time in sculpture, in video, in film, in performance, in event, in exhibition. The Green Ray will be projected two more times over the exhibition run, on Wednesday, October 28 and Friday, November 13, 2020. Both screenings are at 12:10pm.
On the podcast What’s Love Got To Do With It?, Alice Notley asks Precious Okoyomon, “How do you think about the future? And do you think about the future with love? Now we’re at the hazy place where we have to think about the future out of this present and how do we think about it?” These questions have been haunting me lately. How do we imagine a future out of an unsustainable present? Amidst the grief and loss of the global pandemic, systemic racialized violence, a divisive political sphere, the economic crisis, and the larger backdrop of our climate emergency? When Okoyomon returns the question, Notley shares that she doesn’t believe in future, only in an expansive present. Perhaps the way forward is not out but in. As our experiences of our present time are increasingly measured by their proximities to ending(s) this exhibition looks for continuities in time. While we reimagine a way forward to what degree can we look to the form of time itself to hold the power for transformation?
All of the exhibition programming is online at the exhibition website, designed by Everything Studio. More information is available about each of the artworks included in the exhibition and some of the videos are available for limited online screening.
Here’s a list of the upcoming online programming:
Artist Talk: Stanya Kahn
Wednesday, October 21, 2020 at 8pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.
Performance by Tosh Basco (aka boychild): “Untitled: darkness” (2020)
Saturday, November 7, 2020 at 2pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.
Conversation: Collective for Radical Death Studies and devynn emory with Anthony Ryan Hatch, Associate Professor of Science in Society at Wesleyan
Monday, November 9, 2020 at 7:30pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.
Artist Talk: Karrabing Film Collective
Wednesday, November 11, 2020 at 6pm
Talk and Reading: Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 6pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.
Artist Talk: Renée Green ’81
Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.