New media at VSW.

The Visual Studies Workshop Gallery (Rochester NY) simultaneously hosted the work of two prominent upstate NY artists: DeProfundis and CAGE: A Filmic Circus on Metaphors on Vision by Lawrence Brose, director of CEPA in Buffalo, NY, and Messages to Extinct Places in the Present Tense, by Christopher Burnett, director of Visual Studies Workshop.

In this exhibit, Burnett and Brose addressed issues of translation: theconstruction of images, the interpretation of meaning, and the complex process linking these practices. The two artists entered this investigation through visually contrasting media, Brose offering richly manipulated prints of color film strips while Burnett showcased detailed word-images of subtle shape and hue.

In DeProfundis Lawrence Brose presented a collection of large-format Iris prints exhibiting film-based images that had been solarized, chemically treated and digitized. The result of these processes is striking: a wash of colors as lucid and bold as sun on spilled motor oil. The images that Brose used for these prints were taken from his personal collection of home movies, movie reels, and his personal collection of photographs spanning from the 1930s into the 1970s. As Brose writes, these images serve to "foreground a critique of the social framing of sexuality and masculinity." Brose's work counters a current conservative movement in gay culture, confronting the viewer with radical images. These images, however, have been disrupted and redirected by Brose's physical intervention on the surface of the film. Such interventions and manipulations not only demand a re-casting of social framing, but engage the viewers and ask for their participation in this process.

In one grouping, each original image appears to be repeated in a three-frame series still bordered by the telltale edging of the 8mm filmstrip. Within each frame, however, the original image has not been manipulated or developed in exactly the same way. If one frame accentuates the bright line of a cheekbone, or the curve of a swimmer's thigh, the next frame might obscure that aspect of the image in the richness of cobalt and an over-spilling depth of purple shadows. Brose describes the effect of this discrepancy between frame images as a "shift in the logic of the image, a transformative staging that highlights the material nature of the film itself." Despite this shift, the observers may attempt to carry their conceptions of the 'original' image--a face, a car, an extended hand--throughout the three-frame series. It is the attention to the material nature of the film, however, that forces the observers to become aware of their own roles in the image-construction process.

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A similar hermeneutic process is invoked by Brose's other exhibited work, CAGE: A Filmic Circus on Metaphors on Vision, a mixed media 'portrait' of the composer, John Cage. Originally commissioned by the Triskel Arts Center in Cork, Ireland, this is the United States premiere of this gallery installation. This exhibit, set in a smaller room on the same level as the main gallery, comprises five large television screens, arranged in a semi-circle, confronting the viewer with individually looping, hour-long videos. These videos are accompanied by independently looping soundscapes that create surprising convergences and discordances through their fragmentation, distortion and repetition.

Back to the main gallery, there, Chris Burnett exhibits hybrid forms of media and the issues raised by translation between media. His Messages to Extinct Places in the Present Tense includes a collec-tion of word-image prints whose subtle tones and shifting borders contrast the vivid colors of Brose's work. Burnett's prints are intriguingly pale from afar, soft at arm's distance, and dizzying as you lean in. There is an optimum distance at which the observer can stand in order to see these prints both as images of various subjects--the eye of a frog, a fossilized footprint--or as text. Burnett's images are composed entirely of tiny lines of softly colored text, similar to the optical effect of a pixilated screen: images are constructed by the human eye's tendency to fill in the gaps and empty spaces between pixels. In this case, however, the 'pixels' are the physical manifestation of the language we use to define the natural world.

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By treating text as merely another physical tool, Burnett, in the same questioning way as Brose (though in a different context and process) draws attention to the physicality of his medium; text, like film, is not merely a means of creating representations and metaphors, but a tangible object that the artist uses as raw material. Burnett transforms text into timeless images, playing on the juxtaposition of softly blending image with the abruptly discrete content of the text. The recreated texts do not create full sentences, but are composed of catch phrases, cliches, and colloquialisms familiar enough to yield linear meaning, yet evasive enough to suggest how little substance such common language contains.

Another piece of Burnett's work also makes use of contemporary technology, incorporating streaming text grabbed from the internet by a custom program of Burnett's design. The fragmented pieces of captured text are projected onto a blank white wall to create subtly shifting images suggestive of bygone worlds. Accompanying this stream of text is a soundscape characterized by background voices, a dog's bark, or a strain of music so distant one can't help but question if it came from somewhere on the street instead of the small speakers situated around the room. This installation may strike the observer as eerily familiar and oddly misaligned with the technologybased medium of the images. The effect is one of displacement; the observer struggles to unite image with text and sound, attempting to synthesize a cohesive meaning from all three. Word, image, sound, and content-generating processes are at the core of Burnett's investigation; the artist constantly questions these tools of communication and through reappropriation and recontextualization investigates the effect created by their challenging juxtaposition.

The device of text as a physical tool used to depict animate life works to accentuate the human need for translation between perception and thought. In contrast, Burnett suggests that animals "think in pictures," and so perform no such translation. Such pictures, Burnett suggests, require "an act of translation in order to exist in the same breath as symbolism." Because our trust in the descriptive authenticity of images has declined, such a translation is inherently questionable: is humankind capable of perceiving a direct connection between word and world? Oral or written language, in the form of comments or captions, help us to translate what we believe to be the 'meaning' of images and sounds, however, such language is equally subject to issues of translation. Words, as well as images, depend on a transformative mental process in order to achieve articulation.

Both Burnett's prints and his installation raise troubling questions on the possibility of real expression and communication. Caught within paradoxical images that we cannot view without attempting an impossible translation and words that we cannot read without losing sight of the image they form, the idea of encompassing the content of each print from a single vantage point seems a lost cause. At this point, one must question the role of the artist in our society. Postmodernism perceives all communication processes as inherently flawed, tainted by each recipient's translation and betrayed by the media employed. This exhibit suggests that art--or any message for that matter--cannot yield and should not be assumed to yield a universal meaning.

Burnett and Brose combined their works to confront their audience with its own limitations and responsibilities in the process of perceiving and gleaning meaning from any document, be it text, image, or a collaborative interaction of hybrid media.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAWRENCE BROSE AND CHRISTOPHER BURNETT

HARMONY BUTTON was an intern in the gallery at Visual Studies Workshop.