At Queen's Nails Projects, SF—an off-site extension of the California Biennial 2008 this year curated by LAXART—Kelly Barrie's video Astral Fields faced Mary Kelly's Antepartum.
Antepartum is a Super 8 film, 1:30 minutes long, made in 1973 of Kelly Barrie in utro-in the belly-moving hidden in the full-term pregnant belly of his mother, Mary Kelly.
Astral Fields is a digital video, 1:30 minutes long, made by subject-turned-artist, Kelly Barrie in 2008. Animating a series of photographs of himself in a spray of flour and light, he mimics the gesture of the earlier piece. In both films, Barrie is the subject—floating in uterine space, or in a semblance of astral space. A turn within a turn, worlds within worlds. Mother and child, child to mother. A slight gesture, almost a wave, between artwork and artwork.
Still images into. . .
moving, twirling film.
Mary Kelly's work ponders the question of identity. I suggest above that Barrie is the subject of the film. But the film is also a self-portrait of the artist. Barrie's responding-corresponding film seems to suggest his work/identity lies within his mother's sphere. Here is generational history, artistic legacy, looping forever belly to belly, face to face. Just how it is: the nature of the cosmos is interrelated, self-reflective, integral.
Vegas Video
Another video conversation is happening over at SFMOMA. Double Down:Two Visions of Las Vegas pairs video projects by Olivo Barbieri and Stephen Dean. I'm not really sure why Las Vegas, other than the coincidence that these two recently made works exist. Las Vegas is so strange it is always a good subject and of course artists will approach the same subject differently.
Barbieri was "tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything" so took to taking arial photographs with a tilt-focus lens. The tilt allows him to choose what is in focus in a sort of plane of clarity, the rest rendered blurred. The result is a strange distortion of wide swaths of land, cities rendered into tiny toy landscapes. It is very odd. The world becomes a model world. The photographer on high, the world below strangely miniature, plastic, silly. It is certainly god's point of view—the view from eternity—humanity's hubris diminished.
The effect is clearly seen here in a photo of the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.
In a series called Site Specific he's been to Rome, Amman, LA, and Shanghai to make photographs and films using the tilt focus lens.
Site Specific_LAS VEGAS 05 is single channel video with audio, 13 minutes long. Sweeping across the desert and up and around the parking lots and fantasy buildings of Las Vegas is like a tour of a train set—tiny buildings, even tinier people and cars. The weird focus makes the ride a bit nauseating and it is with some relief it ends and the screen goes blank.
One film ends and the other begins. You swirl around on the bench [yay! a bench! What is it with video installations with no seating?] and the opposite wall fills with colored squares.
Stephen Dean closes in on his subject and picks up on patterns. In Las Vegas he focused on neon, those huge banks of lights and panels blinking, changing colors. Soon silhouettes appear: men on cranes come to fix the lights. The film is nearly an abstraction of shapes and colors accompanied by the cacophony of electronic slot machines, bells, talking, clanging—the ubiquitous, omnipresent noise of the casino. Barbieri takes you up and above; Dean takes you close in. Why is it called No More Bets? That's the call before the wheel spins or the dice is thrown. The high stakes moment. Win or lose. Hold your breath, this is what gambling is all about, that moment, the chance moment. And these are the lights and sounds that frame that moment like all the drums and horns, flames and firecrackers that accompany divinations and trance.
Unlike Barrie and Kelly, Barbieri and Dean's films complement each other, but don't really converse. Their pairing was a curatorial coupling augmented by screenings of Viva Las Vegas and Showgirls.
And Yet Another Conversation
Conversation 1. Mr. Davis said, "I'm feeling really weird," recalled his wife, Pebbles. The two lay down for a nap and when she woke up, her husband was dead.
To tie all themes together: Conversations happens to be the title of a series I've done in collaboration with Alanna Simone. . . my daughter. We mingled and paired photographs creating diptychs, double visions sometimes, or complementary. Then, using a chance technique, we titled them with fragments of news. The whole process a mingling of memories, responses, and by creating one work, a merging of identity—which you kind of can't get around when you're family. Next stop, curiously enough, is Las Vegas.
Conversation 3. Grandpa always wanted to visit the Soviet Union.
Barbieri's Long Beach photo courtesy of Metropolis Magazine.
