Interactive work evokes complex memories
Memory is no easy thing to depict. Painters try, obscuring images with veils of color. Video artists add sound and time to the mix -- but you're still just looking at a monitor. Petra Gemeinboeck, with the help of Mary Agnes Krell and Craig Dietrich, uses digital and laser technology to powerfully and beautifully evoke the memory of a space -- a memory that is sparked by and comes to include the viewer's presence.
The project, at Studio Soto, is the culmination of a residency the artists held at Do While Studio, a digital art think tank. Gemeinboeck came from Australia to work on the project. Do While and Studio Soto have partnered to offer the residency and exhibit the work, ''Impossible Geographies 01: Memory."
The show comes on the heels of Scott Snibbe's ''Shadow Play" at Art Interactive, in which the viewer could play with his or her own slowed-down or repeated shadow image. Gemeinboeck goes beyond that, embracing the three-dimensional stage of the gallery.
She and her collaborators have threaded the room with a network of laser beams and mounted video projections on two walls. Step into the gallery and you appear, in fuzzy, slightly delayed black and white, in the video. Every laser beam you cross triggers a pattern of already captured images: The picture of you fractures to reveal a wispy video of someone else who has long since left the gallery. A spooky soundtrack of collected sounds from the street, distorted and slowed, adds to the mood.
This, then, is the memory of the room itself, regurgitated back as randomly as memories themselves arise, and with a nebulous beauty. Just as in real life, the images cycle between present and past; the video continually returns to the viewer -- indeed, that image never completely dissolves as the older ones rise up and ebb away. ''Impossible Geographies" enables the viewer to imagine stepping into someone else's swirling psyche and playing a bit part.
Haunting and absorbing though it is, ''Impossible Geographies" could be even more ambitious: The projection on one large wall is nearly impossible to see, and ideally there would be video on all four walls. But these are quibbles. To invoke a poker analogy, Gemeinboeck and company have seen Snibbe and raised him, creating a powerfully absorbing interactive work.
Double vision
The painter Shelley Reed was a colorist in art school 20 years ago, but her palette has been black and white; color can distract and prettify, and Reed's work, though beautiful, was never intended to be pretty. Her diptych up at Mario Diacono at Ars Libri appropriates a mural of 17th-century Dutch painter Melchior d'Hondecoeter, taking a relatively happy scene and imbuing it with foreboding.
We see a pool in the foreground, bisected down the middle by a break between the canvases. The break also splits a pillar, clean and tall on the left but crumbling on the right. Two swans and a variety of ducks and other birds occupy the pool and its surroundings; a magpie caws in a dying tree above the water.
Reed riddles us with her imagery: Are the two panels mirror images? Has time passed between one panel and the next? A manor house on the left does not show up on the right, where a happy couple ambles under ominous clouds.
There's a constant give and take between the painting's two sides; each contains images of hope and of threat, heightened by Reed's talent with a brush. The swans are muscled and lithe; every creature seems to embody a different mood or tension. This is dark work, but it's lit by intelligence and deft technique.
Changing subjects
''Transitional," the new exhibition at Fort Point Arts Community Gallery, pairs Ian Kennelly's paintings of construction sites with Dean DeCocker's photographs of clouds. Get it? The subjects are in transition.
DeCocker is the older and more accomplished artist, and he shoots some beautiful clouds, which he prints on a surprisingly small scale -- you could almost fit them in a photo album. But clouds are one of the most overused symbols for transcendent beauty, and for that reason they're extraordinarily hard to tackle. DeCocker is an able photographer but offers nothing special or new about clouds.
Likewise, Kennelly's paintings don't really go beyond the mundane depiction of heavy machinery and worksites. Meredyth Hyatt Moses, a usually talented curator, is FPAC's guest juror for 2005-06. She must have been napping when this show was proposed.
Petra Gemeinboeck: Impossible Geographies 01: Memory
At: Studio Soto, 63 Melcher St., through Aug. 28. 617-426-7686. www.studiosoto.com.
Shelley Reed: A Golden Age (After Melchior d’Hondecoeter)
At: Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, 500 Harrison Ave.,, through Aug. 31. 617-560-1608.
Dean DeCocker and Ian Kennelly: Transitional
At: Fort Point Arts Community Gallery, 300 Summer St., through Sept. 10. 617-423-4299. www.fortpointarts.org.
