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Art
Electronics serving aesthetics
[Photo: Scarfone/Hartley Galleries ]
Black Dog Retreat by Tom Chambers.
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Rarely is art as literally interactive as in Scarfone/Hartley Galleries' ''Electronics Alive II,'' where machines replace the traditional tools of artists.
By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 6, 2003
TAMPA -- "Electronics Alive II" sounds like a science fair, and science certainly figures into the show, but only as it serves art. The new exhibition at Scarfone/Hartley Galleries at the University of Tampa takes as a unifying theme the computer in partnership with artists, about a dozen whom work digitally in animation, interactive CD ROM, photography and installations.
The marquee name is Eduardo Kac, a well-known international digital artist. He gained some infamy with GFP Bunny in 2000, an albino rabbit Kac and several French scientists altered with a jellyfish's gene that made the rabbit glow fluorescent green. (After its 15 minutes of cause celebre, the bunny became a Kac family pet, a living example of art becoming a part of your life, perhaps.)
Genesis is a rumination on his obsession with bioengineering. Projected onto a large wall in a darkened room, a circular image is alive with yellow and blue blobs, like living organisms in a giant petri dish. Wall notes tell us he created a synthetic "gene" by translating a sentence from Genesis about man's domination over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the earth into Morse Code, then converted the code into DNA base pairs. In the original installation, first in Europe and last year at MIT's prestigious Digital Salon, an image of real bacteria was projected, into which the synthetic gene had been introduced. The gene mutated as ultraviolet light, activated by people's interaction, shone on it. In effect, the Bible was being rewritten as a life was changing on a molecular level. Heavy stuff, and don't try it at home.
Compared with Kac's primordial mudpies, the art by the rest of the group seems conservative, though much of it shines with creative and technical prowess.
Hidekazu Minami connects a radar screen of Manhattan to a map and sound system that locates an area of the city and broadcasts ambient sounds he recorded there, subtle ones we tune out as background noise or never hear above the dim. It's all about life that goes on around us unnoticed.
Grainy snippets of silent movie classic, Nosferatu, are mixed with her own work in cinematographer Barbara Lattanzi's Muscle and Blood Piano, accompanied by creepy music: a look through a glass darkly made even darker.
The best of the video bunch is Jeffrey Lerer's The Gilbert Hotel, a series of animated shorts about a fictional seedy residential hotel in the 1950s, with a film noir feel, Charles Mingus score and eccentric characters such as "Head guy," a big, severed, one-eyed head that gives the janitor fits in its accented Russian. I was mesmerized.
Manipulated photographs range from super-realistic to abstract, their vibrant colors, juxtaposed images and quirky composition tributes to the power of an increasinglydigitized medium. Steve Carlisle, who is both a photographer and owner of Thunderbird Editions, one of the most progressive printshop studios in the area, has two of his own mixed-media works in the show. Two other photographers, Anna Tomczak and Maggie Taylor, created their prints in his studio as well. Tomczak's floral still lifes bloom lushly and decadently; Taylor's Poet's House and Tom Chamber's Black Dog Retreat hew to a classic photographic narrative tradition with more intensity, like Alfred Stieglitz on steroids.
Museumgoers may recall Joanne Steinhardt's large installation, turn it and turn it in last summer's underCURRENT/overVIEW at the Tampa Museum of Art, in which she projected computer codes onto interior and exterior tent panels that were interrupted by viewers' silhouettes she captured with more projectors. The other changes the self is a more personal, intimate work that sets up a human dialogue rather than one between man and machine. Sidelit clear glass panels etched with cryptic messages line up in a dark room. They reflect your image and that of anyone else standing at the other end of the glass row multiple times, like windows and mirrors. As you walk along, your movement trips a projector that creates shadow images on a separate glass panel made opaque by an acid dip. It sounds contrived, but the effect is introspective and harmonious.
Gallery director Dorothy Cowden packs a lot into a small space, but the good news is that she'll soon have much more to work with when Scarfone/Hartley moves to larger digs as the university embarks on its expansion later this year. For now, the gallery is off the beaten path, but worth finding.
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REVIEW: "Electronics Alive II," at Scarfone/Hartley Galleries at the University of Tampa, 401 W Kennedy Blvd., through Feb. 27. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Free admission. (813) 253-6217.
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