December 2021 – Art Memo Magazine

“Listen up, motherf*ckers! Now we’re having fun.” The lines come squawking through a speaker (as in, an object producing sound) on the floor, but who is the speaker (as in, the subject producing the thought)? Is it the African grey parrot, or the scarlet macaw represented in high definition on two vertically-oriented wall monitors? Do we take it to be the human who has voiced it in the style of a parrot? Or is it rather the medium itself that speaks; the speaker on the floor? In any case, these elements comprise Talk to Us (2021, dual channel video/audio) one of two video installations from Diana Thater included in “The Conversation” at 1301PE.

Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin

Complicating matters, each line is echoed in a different voice from another part of the gallery. Moving to the second floor of the gallery, one finds Listen to Us (2021, dual channel video/audio) a similarly constructed installation. Here, the two monitors face each other from opposite walls, and the African grey has been replaced with what is by comparison a diminutive Amazon parrot.

Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin

In both pieces, squeaks, whistles, and caws from a second speaker on the floor punctuate, interrupt, and distract from the spoken text. Is this background noise? A translation of the human speak into parrot squawk? Maybe the other way around? Or is the titular conversation between these two voices speaking in wildly different tongues? If it is indeed a conversation, it’s not one that is easy to follow. However, the rich color of the high definition video, the enveloping sound, and the scarlet macaw-colored gels covering the windows on both floors of the gallery provide an enthralling sensory experience to move through. We are having fun!

Diana Thater, Talk to Us 2021. Dual audio/video. Photo by Dave Martin

Beyond the fun, however, there are layers of meaning to unpack and to contemplate. For example, the conversation between human and animal is one that is fraught with difficulty. We speak for animals, and we talk over them. A conversation implies two or more parties that are equal in some way, and this conversation is held back by those who believe that between human and animal there is (to borrow a phrase from Jane Goodall) a difference of kind, and not simply one of degree. Additionally, the idea that nature is somehow “out there” and not surrounding us at every moment—whether in a gallery, at home, or in the outdoors—erects barriers to sympathy as well.

Thater’s work with animals has long pointed toward sympathy with the inhabitants of the natural world; sympathy that years of scientific classification and bifurcation have perhaps eroded in our culture. Layers of mediation and translation permeate the work, as do many of Thater’s video installations. She doesn’t shy away from revealing the technology that enables her immersive installations. Mediation itself is a key component to her thinking about the relationship between humans and the animals she films, whether it comes through a piece of equipment or through language itself. At this moment in history, the presence of the video apparatus may even heighten the experience. As so many of our day-to-day interactions with real people have been happening via screens, there is perhaps less of a barrier between mediated presence and actual presence. This lends the birds a sense of reality that viewers may not have been available two years ago. Even the occasional jump cut in the editing could be taken as evidence of a network hiccup rather than a preconstructed video feed. These birds feel both alive and live.

This also threatens to anthropomorphize the birds more than perhaps Thater would intend. Anthropomorphism is something Thater resists in her work, less the animals depicted simply become characters and not autonomous entities deserving of life and dignity. However, the piece never reaches the level of Disneyesque talking animals, and perhaps her close flirtation with anthropomorphism allows the viewer to realize how easily humans do the inverse—dehumanize one another.

One instance of this dehumanization is how in-power groups refer to displaced humans, be they refugee, immigrant, or otherwise. Here is another group that is spoken for, interrupted, and spoken over. These birds in particular provide an apt metaphor for understanding something about cycles of displacement. The birds are all labeled “exotic,” but are also common household pets far from their places of origin. These birds have lived through trauma due to commodification, abuse, and/or neglect. As birds living at the Intertwined Conservation Corporation as part of their avian rescue program, they are witness to just some of the horrors of global consumption. In the context of global climate catastrophe and the resulting ever-growing migration and refuge seeking, some of the dialogue (particularly “remove and replace”) takes on a menacing tone.

The connection to displaced humans is a parallel to contemporary society, and there’s a historical parallel one can draw as well. Birds remind us of a time when dinosaurs were the dominant inhabitants on the planet. That our current pending apocalypse is caused by burning the fossilized remains of that era as a fuel source has a certain morbid irony. Perhaps the tale of the bird is a cautionary one for us in the Anthropocene, one about how the mighty fall and the inevitability of change.

None of these interpretations are directly suggested by the work, but the balance Thater strikes between concrete language and vague context opens up space for multiple interpretations. The loop is only a few minutes long, enabling the viewer to hear the entire performance repeated for several rounds in a viewing. Recognizable sections emerge. A section listing action verbs (some relegated to human activity, some to avian activity “to perch, to stand, so sit, to lay, to throw…”) is followed by a listing of pairs of related words (“talk and listen” “up and down” text and poetry”) to a listing of the formal aspects of video work (“space time image color sound light”) and then a series of exhortations. The words, though vague, all relate to the installation in some way, be it the birds, the technology, or the title. Again, mediation itself is a key element to the work conceptually and formally.

There are meanings that are revealed via the initial unfamiliarity, and then others that are suggested only when one has a grasp of the cadence. Some phrases (i.e., “This is the good life”) are heard in varying degrees of sarcasm and earnestness. The copy seems as if it could have been lifted from a number of sources; one catches hints of Shakespearean text, Quentin Tarantino films, and advertising copy from the 1940s. The work hints at didacticism without becoming overly teachy, and the experience of the language is a bodily experience above a textual one. After several cycles of the looping audio, the exhortation that stands out most is, “Get out of this room. Get out of my mind!” Point taken.

“The Conversation” marks a welcome return to the gallery space for Thater, whose 2020 piece yes there will be singing was only viewable via streaming online video. Whereas that piece indicated a certain silence from humans, Talk to Us and Listen to Us are a cacophony of sound, and a spatial experience that encompasses two floors of the gallery. In conversation as well as in “The Conversation,” we communicate with much more than just words. The work is neither overtly optimistic nor pessimistic; just indicative that the conversation writ large goes on, and that we all contribute, in ways wittingly and otherwise.

“The Conversation”
September 25th, 2021 – December 4th, 2021
1301PE
6150 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90048
www.1301pe.com

One of my favorite half-truths in the art world is that there really isn’t anything new, just variations of what’s come before. It’s true that what might appear undeniably “new” can be endlessly dissected into “old” components, merely recombined. This seems like a dispiriting process, but it reveals another truth: that something exists apart from the components themselves; something that develops relationally, between them.

That same principle applies to exhibitions, too. Based on how works are grouped, aligned and contextualized, an exhibition can charge art objects with new meanings, evoke ideas and feelings between objects, and summon themes from a group of them. The power in this unseen relationality—the connections between things—often makes the difference between a great show and a show merely with great art.

In “We are all guests here,” a group show at Bridge Projects about the Jewish tradition of Sukkot, the difference is clear. Sukkot commemorates the time the Jews spent wandering the desert after being liberated from slavery in Egypt, and is celebrated in a “sukkah,” which is a temporary walled structure of foliage resembling the shelter that once protected them. Each work in the exhibition was selected or created in response to the holiday, often through the motif of the enclosure. What emerges from that group effort is a meditation on tradition, time and human vulnerability that is so layered and moving, it appeals to far more than strictly religious interests.

SaraNoa Mark, “Prayer for Rain.” Carved clay, carved glass, aluminum, water collected from Lake Michigan, Mississippi River, Colorado River, and Castaic Lake. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

Much of the show’s success comes from how it cultivates not only a deep sense of human history, but a heightened awareness of the present passing of time. In SaraNoa Mark’s warped and rectangular abstractions of carved clay and stone, for example, there is something both ancient and tender, like seeing humanity’s first marks on the earth. And like the glass vessels of her “Prayer for Rain” series, they don’t fit the logic of artifacts, but conjure the feeling of them. Mark’s clay and stone works are cleverly placed nearby Brody Albert’s found photos of desert rock formations, which are faded to near oblivion. Albert re-reframed the photos to include their un-faded edges, indexing decades of sun exposure—turning time into subject, image into object.

A sense of human history and sensitivity to time comes from ritual, too, not just objects. In a video-installation around the corner from Albert’s photos, a procession carries bouquets down a desert road. To a dirge, they walk, they perform a ceremony, they lay on the earth. Mira Burack, the artist behind Sacred Bouquet (2021), intercut the scene with closeups of local insects and flora, elegantly conflating the cycles of nature with the repeated actions of ritual, and what each carries through time.

Mira Burack, Sacred Bouquet, 2021. Four-channel video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

Almost like a ritual might carry something ancient, many objects in the show also combine and confound past and present, old and new, permanent and temporary, often through contemporary technology. Adam McKinney’s Shelter in Place (2021), for example, pairs augmented reality with tintypes, an early form of photography common in the nineteenth century. Viewing the antiquated scenes through a smartphone, their subject steps into the present. Other artists used 3D printing, like the artist duo Rael San Fratello, who used the process to make their Ombre Decanters. From an ash-colored base, each vessel blooms into such intricate geometry that they resemble something both computer-generated and artifactual. Brody Albert also used 3D printing in his series “We Buy Houses” (2021), in which he recreated weathered and discarded objects in wood. After balancing the objects on scaffolding and dyeing the entire structure the same color, the objects merge—precarious fuses into permanence, temporary becomes totemic.

Brody Albert, “We Buy Houses,” 2021. Dyed wood, 3D-printed wood filament, steel. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

The ways in which these works overlap and interact—which invite the viewer to simultaneously think of the past and the present passing of time—create some of the show’s most compelling effects. “We are all guests here” bends the arc of human history inward, allowing the viewer to commune with past generations, seemingly all at once. And as an awareness of the past and the passing of time grows, so does a commensurate awareness of impermanence, both as a matter of personal experience, and collective. In this context, the touch of past generations—through the long, branching, iteratively-twisted arms of ritual and tradition—feels increasingly like a comfort. Even as an atheist, I nonetheless felt the force of the religious tradition emanating from these works.

But there are no simple statements in this show. Even when it stirs compassion, it’s no feel-good or easy exhibition. Its response to Sukkot is challenging, and its focus on the sukkah, that emblem of shelter, is more contemplative and poetic than it is protective. For instance, sitting inside Rael San Fratello’s Sukkah of the Signs (2021), a temple-like structure shingled with the cardboard signs of the homeless, you can see its exposed construction and smell its freshly-cut lumber. But among the implied presence of the many without shelter, those percepts take on a darker note. Likewise, Adam McKinney’s Shelter in Place encircles its viewers with tintypes, swirling tree branches, floating video displays, and a dancing, augmented-reality apparition, but the space feels more haunted by its past: the sole black man in each tintype stands next to a cop car, gravestones, and a trailer with “cotton belt” emblazoned on it. The exhibition’s poignant socio-political commentary occasionally drifts into the unearthly, too. In Jenny Yurshansky’s We Are All Guests Here (2021), for example, its floating, latticed walls of glass embody the ethereality of a spiritual object, yet appear fragile and unwelcoming.

Adam W. McKinney, Shelter in Place, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

The show’s simultaneous contemplation of the past and the religious object is further complicated, subtly, by several works that turn attention inward—by how they confuse the object with what is seen through the object. In another piece by Yurshansky, Blacklisted: A Planted Allegory (Memoriam) (2015), a shadowy landscape droops from two nails. As the voile gently ripples, awareness shifts from the printed image to the object itself, conflating the object with the image “beyond” it. Brody Albert similarly flattens object and vision with his Untitled (2019) pieces, in which cyanotypes of tattered window screens are framed in indigo-dyed wood. Where one might expect to see through, there is only an opaque object. Similarly, in Cuarto de Estar (Living Room) (2021), Susy Bielak has replaced the mirrors in antique dressers with photo transfers. Where one might expect their own visage, there is only past.

Jenny Yurshansky, We are all guests here, 2021. Glass. Courtesy of the artist and Bridge Projects. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

While I love fine art—how it lets us explore human experience through combinations of what we already know—I often criticize it for being too insular, too self-referential. What enables “We are all guests here” to accomplish so much, and why it stands out in today’s art scene, is that it speaks through a visual language understood by more than just the art world. From deep within our lived experience, it can excavate something unusual and unfamiliar, yet still feel universal. “We are all guests here,” in the way it intones human vulnerability, echoes the shape of tradition, and loops time inward, works a spell that no studio dialect could. And maybe more importantly, it teaches us—attuned to its spell—all that we should listen for when we step back into the world.

“We are all guests here”
Curated by: Cara Megan Lewis, Linnéa Gabriella Spransy Neuss, Vicki Phung Smith, and Michael Wright
September 3, 2021 – January 15, 2022
Bridge Projects
6820 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038
www.bridgeprojects.com