Moving pictures
The video art exhibit at JayJay offers a rare gallery experience
By Victoria Dalkey - Bee Art Correspondent
Story appeared in TICKET section, Page TICKET8
Friday, July 25, 2008

Entering the darkened gallery space at JayJay on Elvas Avenue, you freeze for a moment while your eyes adjust to the lighting. Almost immediately, you are drawn to a dual video projection by Doreen Maloney that calls up memories of childhood and long summer days.

"It's about the simple pleasures," says Rachel Clarke, who curated the show of video art for JayJay.

You feel like a kid again as you watch moving images in a corner of the gallery that give you a slightly disorienting yet pleasurable experience. As you watch the one on the right (the artist who looks like a child swaying on a swing and looking up into trees), the image on the left (a shot looking up into the treetops) confuses your sense of balance, giving you the feeling of being in the swing, going up and down, side to side, turning in circles.

A professor of art at California State University, Sacramento, the British-born Clarke invited nine contemporary artists to exhibit their work as part of JayJay's Introductions program. The artists she selected from around the country range from recent master of fine arts graduates such as Erika Dawn and Natalie Rishe to internationally exhibited artists such as Darrin Martin, David Phillips and Paul Rowley, whose "Gravity Loop" – a complex video with a score by East Coast composer Emily Manzo – is the star of the show.

The exhibition, titled "Home and Away" deals with themes of memory and loss, time and relativity, the quality of light and lightness of being. In Maloney's piece, for example, you experience a sense of momentary weightlessness as you lose track of up and down and find yourself spinning into a daydream of long days when school is out and you have time to let your mind wander.

"Home and Away" offers Sacramentans an opportunity to see a show solely devoted to video art (or "new media," as it is sometimes called) in a private gallery. In some senses, video art resembles the mythical griffin or the Push-me Pull-you in Dr. Dolittle's zoo – a made-up beast or, conversely, a beast made up of more than one animal.

Shows solely devoted to video art are almost as rare in Sacramento as long-running shows of performance art – not because it isn't done here but because of its polyglot nature. Like performance art (not to be confused with the performing arts – dance, drama, music, etc.), video art is ephemeral in the sense that it takes place within a time frame.

(Examples of performance art, a portmanteau term, range from the works of Laurie Anderson or the Blue Man Group to poetry readings, musical performances or theater productions that have a large component of spontaneity or take advantage of ambient circumstances, such as John Cage's " 4'33" " or Alan Kaprow's happenings.)

Unlike performance art, which is often recorded on videotape or in still photos as a method of documentation, video art can be viewed at any time and in any place if you have a computer or television with DVD player. Granted, you may miss some of the drama of a gallery presentation of video art, which can resemble installation art when you look at it, but in most cases, you get the gist of it and can either imagine it installed or carry the memory of it as it appeared when you first saw it in a gallery.

So how does video art differ from watching TV or going to a movie? Sometimes it isn't different at all (especially if you have one or more big-screen TVs or a DVD projector), but in some cases, video art falls flat when the video component of an installation is screened in your living room or office. "Gravity Loop," for example, is a winner no matter where or how you view it, while Maloney's piece, Martin's "Strange Fruit Sound" and Stephen Eakin's "Switchboxes" are best viewed in a gallery setting.

Up through Aug. 2, "Home and Away" gives you an idea of both the virtues and pitfalls of video art, which has become a mainstay of institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive and Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art.

Here's a look at what you will see at JayJay: "Summer," dual video projection by Doreen Maloney

Originally shot, the artist writes, to show "the intimate pleasure I take when no one is looking." Lying on her porch swing and spinning, so that the world goes round and round, the piece defines space in a new way while also addressing the body and intimacy. "Slow Day, Floods Ghosts and Contamination & 1956," documentary videos by Jenny Stark

The most traditionally "filmic" works in the show according to Clarke, Stark's trio of short documentaries, which juxtapose interviews with real people and often disturbing or disjunctive imagery, are just as strong on your home television set as in the gallery, where you must wear earphones to hear the voice-over interviews. "Gravity Loop," single video projection by Paul Rowley and David Phillips with music by Emily Manzo

This charming video loop of an image of a cuckoo clock painted blue on a blue background entrances the viewer with what looks like stop- motion animation, but is actually a single image digitally manipulated in rhythm with Manzo's hypnotic, gamelanlike score for prepared piano set up according to John Cage's instructions. "Switchboxes," video installation by Stephen Eakin

This industrial chic installation emphasizes, says Clarke, the "elegant austerity of manufactured objects" while serving as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of human relationships through the use of images of the electrical power grid. "Untitled (San Francisco), Untitled (River Delta), Untitled (Rancho Seco)" video projections and Light Box Duratrans (copyrighted term) by Ernest J. Zárate

There's a quiet charm to this series that makes it a sleeper. The video projections use time-lapse photos of three familiar places (the Bay Bridge from Coit Tower), Rancho Seco, and a radio tower in the Delta) to show the passage of time in the landscape from dusk to dawn to dusk. "Strange Fruit Sound," sculpture with 18-minute loop, video, sound, mixed media by Darrin Martin

Architectural fragments and a still life with fruit obscure a reclining male figure seen from the rear as the image is overlaid with complex grids of bright color and silence is broken by a counterpoint of metallic, electronic, and staticlike sounds in this complex, rhythmic but somewhat soporific and irritating video installation. "Soft Tissue," video of still photographs by Natalie Rishe

The most difficult piece to grasp both in person and on video monitor, this slow, silent video of body parts moves like molasses as ambiguous fleshy and hairy surfaces morph into abstract forms. "Far Away," video projection with dual soundtracks by Erika Dawn

This eerie and frequently disturbing video composed of images of a formally furnished "haunted" house viewed from a child's eye level and a sound track with whispering voices issuing warnings ("Don't touch anything! ... So far away! ... Can't control it!") is a little like the "Blair Witch Project" in its disjunctive construction and ominous subtexts. "Somnium," ongoing video/ interview project by Rachel Clarke and M. Azevedo

This edgy yet humorous series of visual and sonic "dream interpretations" range from universal anxiety dreams such as a never-ending highway" where "either the brakes don't work or the off-ramps lead nowhere" to wish-fulfillment dreams of empowerment wherein a woman can use telekinesis to move objects in a room. The viewer relaxes in a "nostalgic" 1970s-era setting with a chair, a princess phone, and a TV set that screens projected images relating to dreams described by voices on the phone.

Though it at times suffers from being overly intellectual and academic, as well as occasionally underwhelming from a visual point of view, "Home and Away" gives us a rare chance to sample new works by mostly young video artists from both coasts in an intimate gallery setting.

Home and Away: Contemporary Video Art
WHEN: 11 a.m.- 4 p.m. Wednesday- Saturday (or by appointment), through Aug. 2
WHERE: JayJay, 5520 Elvas Ave., Sacramento
HOW MUCH: Free
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999