The obligatory video: Core show heavy on moving images
Is it not enough anymore for an artist to concentrate on drawing, painting or sculpture?
I had to wonder, viewing the 2018 Core Exhibition at Lawndale Art Center, featuring work by the current group of seven artists-in-residence of the Glassell School of Art’s Core Program.
Though their subject matter varies, and most of them also make objects, five of the seven emerging talents incorporate video within their installations, suggesting that mastery of moving images has become a necessary skill in the tool box.
Video, of course, is cheaper to make than objects and doesn’t require much of a studio. And it’s good for artists to experiment with all the technology available to them.
Dazzling, immersive environments combining multiple channels and wall-to-wall screens have become dependable crowd magnets at museums. (Pipilotti Rist’s combined “Pixel Forest” and “Worry Will Vanish” installation, seen last summer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is a fine example.)
The challenge now is how to use video to create something viewers haven’t seen before, and figuring out when and if it’s needed at all. The Core show’s installations don’t break new ground but show thoughtful efforts.
I was most taken by the two small-screen, moving collage-videos of Maria Bang Espersen’s “As American as Apple Pie” in the smallish thirdfloor gallery, mainly because they’re fun to watch. Each depicts a quintessentially traditional American neighborhood street scene, still except for the movement of passing cars. The cars are like phantoms — outlines filled with imagery of an early-American interior with a braided rug, a spinning wheel and a Windsor in front of a hearth. The furnishings reflect a lifestyle promoted in Wallace Nutting’s 1910 book, “Furniture of the Pilgrim Century.”
I would have found the videos fascinating on their own, but they add a dynamic layer to Espersen’s other, more static work: a series of large ceramics inspired by vintage gelatin molds. Taken together, they build a theme about mass-produced home goods as patriotic propaganda. (Espersen has also applied a block of popular “Williamsburg Blue” paint on one wall.)
Shana Hoehn’s “Boggy Creek Version 2” installation combines a large, two-channel projection with two props — a glasssided boat with an exotic, Indonesian figurehead and a plaster cast of a huge foot. The video leads viewers on an entertaining, mysterious trip with the artist through an East Texas swamp. She has exerpted a few scenes from the 1972 docu-horror flick “The Legend of Boggy Creek,” about the search for Bigfoot.
The props make the film feel more immediate but also decorative, as if Hoehn sensed that the film alone wasn’t enough. The boat is a lovely object, although it’s not clear if the artist made it or if it’s a found object.
Devin Kenny’s smallscreen videos attempt something edgy: The murky and dark “More or Less” depicts a guy feeling his way across the floor of a small, unlit room; when the lights come on at the end, he stands up and walks away nonchalantly. “Not This” is more of a videopainting — a spectrographic color show with sound and vocals.
Far across the big downstairs gallery, Kenny has hung a series of small paintings on aluminum. They relate to a shared work with Felipe Steinberg, “Save My Number,” which consists of a pile of 29 signs in the “We Buy Houses” vein. (Steinberg’s “000000,” titled after the industrial code for the color black, fills three walls with black paint, amplifying the black identity theme.)
Next to a turntable that operates only when there’s a DJ present, Kenny’s complex painting “Black Networks” makes me wish he would paint more.
Yue Nakayama has created a tiny karaoke bar with “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away,” setting up a couple of live microphones in front of a video of a road trip through a small Texas town with dinosaur fossils. Nakayama borrowed her title from a hipster-country classic song by Don Hicks. You expect to see Hicks’ lyrics on the screen but instead see snippets of existenial conversations, archived from real-life situations. It makes for a weird and funny disconnect; as does the printout Nakayama provides of an essay, “How Secularism Works!” (She lost me there.)
Filmmaker Peng Zuqiang takes the straightforward route with his single-channel video “I Don’t Remember the Name,” a documentary without narration that examines a disappearing community of Chinese immigrants in Cuba whose ancestors arrived in the mid-19th century as indentured workers. The film also observes how Chinese capital has been manifest there.
The most compelling work of the show has no video. Elizabeth M. Webb’s “Cameo Ground (Children of Paradise)” is a series of thin porcelain sculptures displayed in light boxes with black velvet frames. The sculptures appear to be etchings of documents made with a vintage typewriter. Only snippets of lines are readable because each piece has been shattered and pockmarked, like a distressed old photograph. The words are from an interview with an aunt about Webb’s great-grandmother, Paradise, a black woman known for her beauty who never allowed her picture to be taken.
I don’t know what Webb’s porcelain-making process is, but I’m pretty sure it’s difficult. The light that shines through the pieces is nearly blinding.
Webb also is a filmmaker, and I could see this installation developing into a solo show that might include moving imagery. But the porcelains are plenty moving, too, in their own way.