I have a friend who used to always obsess about pans. Not in a cooking or cloven-hoofed sense, but in terms of cinematic visuals. What is so riveting about a long, panning shot in a movie, she would explain, is that it allows us to scan a scene with a fluidity our own eyes don't offer. Take a moment now and look up from the page. Choose a horizon and try to pan steadily across it without having your eyes minutely skip forward and refocus. You can't do it. In a movie, you can maintain focus on the center of the screen as the image moves past, but your own eyes moving across the same set of images will search out information and waypoints, lacking the utter objectivity of a camera lens. Even though life and all its vibrant, kinetic imagery barrels past us with fairly smooth consistency, we are continually shifting focus on various points which allow us to take in a whole, apparently seamless picture. Our eyes ratchet past all of the detail in the process of building a coherent environment, but we don't spend much time noticing all of these momentary focal points in and of themselves. If we did, we'd be Uta Barth or Jim Campbell, two of four artists exhibiting at SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199).
With three distinct bodies of work on view, Barth's photography brings what is generally unstudied into sharp definition, playing against the neutral gallery walls for all it's worth and creating a clean, white space with windows illuminating the remarkable gravity, composition and beauty of what is always within the scope of vision but rarely seen. In particular, Barth's
White Blind
series, arranged here as an intimate chapel to the lazy, contour-drawing architecture of leafless trees and power lines interspersed with colored panels-beats in the course of motion, a poem to the periphery-illustrates the meditative power of her unexpected snapshots. The room housing Barth's
White Blind
work is only missing a small, comfortable pillow to rest one's knees on while basking in the hum and throb of several perfectly arranged sets of images.
Next is James Drake, infamous and always oddly thoughtful, with his spectacular effort,
City of Tells
. Drake's reworking of Raphael's
School of Athens
is, before anything else, a massive and immensely capable charcoal drawing. But Drake has populated the familiar scene with his own inspirations, mentors, friends and heroes-the kind of crisp investigation of one's essence and influences each of us ought to undertake as a requisite to self-knowledge. Of particular delight is a key to the individuals whom the artist has included in the form of a massive hardback book, mercifully there for the rifling, greasy fingerprints and accidental folding of the masses. It's a rare treat to have an artist perceive elements of work as items to be used, rather than revered solely as precious objects. In this case the object will become more precious for the handling. The exercise continues for Drake as he examines and juxtaposes human nature and inclinations, up close and personal, with varied animals in both video and charcoal drawing form.
Engineer by trade and artist by calling, Campbell, through a focused, logical mind, portrays prodding excavations into perception not only in visual terms, but related to time and memory. In one of the three rooms occupied by his ongoing laboratory of blinking, murmuring, eye-arresting experiments, Campbell has compressed the entire film
Psycho
onto a single plane. Because it is a brooding film of long shots, certain images remain perceptible in a mass of lights and darks. Across the room, facing
Psycho
, Campbell has given the same treatment to
The Wizard of Oz
which-a frantic, color-filled explosion of a movie-appears as a pink-blue haze of cotton candy. Campbell's curiosities lead him much deeper than those works alone, however, and into investigating an impressive swath of ideas with his mixed strategy of scientific rigor and artistic playfulness. Whether manifest by LiteBrite-style LED studies in figurative detail perception, constantly counting mechanical/circadian clocks, or the interplay of human movement across an unchanging façade, his works share a surprising, rhythmic sensory jazz presence; each is intelligent not only for the ideas expressed, but because the viewer interacts intuitively, sitting in on the jam.
There is a problem with the work of the final artist Kiki Seror-there's not nearly enough of it. Her extrapolations of internet chat room sex talk into a linguistic barrage of 3D typefaces presented on duratrans light boxes ushers in-at long last-the era of artists who, rather than trying too hard to incorporate the internet and contemporary conundrums of communication into their work, simply understand innately our conceptual age with all its trappings and encumbrances of design, materiality and byte-fuelled elasticity. These ideas, in Seror's chat room parlance, are so ripe and moist and ready to explode, that a future column, timed to coincide with Seror's March 8 artist talk, will address her work in detail.
Taken altogether, the work of the four artists is sometimes disconnected, sometimes complementary, but unilaterally triumphant. There is no weak link here and no matter the leaps from one artist's ideas to the next, traversing the required mental landscape is one very long, very sweet pan.
