Projection Protection
by Rachel Dainer Best
A NoDef Art Review
Video art is hard. A lot of people don’t want to spend more than a couple seconds on any given piece and they only want to see it from behind the screen of their point and shoot. They forego those darkened museum rooms, secluded by heavy curtains where videos play on loop. So, an exhibition of video art is really hard. But it can be done. And Antenna Gallery’s most recent show, Projection Bias, does it well.
The show is about projection, the Freudian kind and the film kind. Robin Wallis Atkinson, the shows curator, selected works from Courtney Fathom Sell, Stephen Kwok, and Michael Anderson that fit into the medium and challenge the viewer to go beyond initial reactions and personal bias to “focus on what something actually is.” The concept comes off as a bit challenging, but the pieces fit the notion in a fantastically straightforward way.
Sell’s piece Erotic Symphony is a mash up of two videos. The piece shows documentation of a man in a transparent plastic mask awash in abstract layers paired with video footage of VHS porn edited to little more than fuzzy black and white images. The concept behind work being that, although bodies are not obvious in the abstracted pornos, the movement will still be there. Sell explained that he intends to “challenge notions of erotica” with these masked images.
If Sell’s Symphony challenges our perception by offering something unrecognizable, and subsequently forcing contemplation through the process of identification, Anderson’s piece works in the opposite direction. Presented with catalogue stock photo images of a model in an array of poses and tight sportswear, we are asked to realize the absurdity of a mundane image by looking at it repeatedly and frankly.
Kwok also does a great thing with a projector. In one of his three pieces he puts three public school pre-digital era projectors on the floor casting a question on the wall, What if you’re not special? The projectors on the floor, however, offer other questions and statements, within the same theme, but with totally different meanings. His work deals with insecurity and, what Atkinson describes as, “questions of personal and social identity.”
Plus with all the lights off and Anderson’s sinister soundtrack playing, it feels good in there.
Projection Bias is on view through May 2 at
Antenna Gallery
3161 Burgundy St
Posted 4-18-2010