Susan Giles
at Vedanta, through December 7
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In Evening at the Renaissance Society in 1995, Stan Douglas simulated newscasts at three fictional Chicago stations on January 1, 1969, and January 1, 1970, in order to re-create the arrival of the happy talk format. Five years later at the Art Institute Douglas exhibited Le Detroit, suspending two screens 6 feet tall and 16 feet wide back-to-back and using synchronized 35-millimeter projectors to display a six-minute black-and-white film loop on either side, creating a shimmering effect. Amy Jenkins in Without, installed last year at Julia Friedman Gallery, projected her 12-minute loop of figurines underwater on a ceiling screen and invited spectators to lie on the floor to watch it.
Five-screen, four-screen, three-screen, two-screen, and one-screen installations appear in three current shows. Susan Giles uses multiple screens to suggest equivalences between tourists at antipodes; Gillian Wearing transposes the faces and voices of a mother and her two sons; and Wafaa Bilal parallels U.S. imperialism with bin Laden’s jihad. The results range from uncanny to confused.
The playful side of 2 Into 1 is undercut by its dark ventriloquist tricks, as Wearing illuminates estrangement among intimates. Ironically the other, multiple-screen works on display, which were not confined by the format of a television broadcast, are less imaginative. In the clinical Drunk (1999), three screens fill one long wall and depict inebriated Londoners stumbling, quarreling, hugging, and dozing in an all-white studio, while the immersive and depressive Broad Street (2001) shows lonely nightlife and bar scenes on five screens spread over four walls. In these cases more is not more.
Bilal interrupts his chronology of overt and covert U.S. interventions after an ABC clip of the WTC collapsing. The screen goes black for a few seconds, and then we see a staged scene in a cornfield: a young man partly disrobes, buries his army fatigues, and walks over the horizon in his shorts and T-shirt. On the facing screen, the girl disappears and Bilal shows the famous black-and-white image of soldiers on Iwo Jima holding up the U.S. flag. One by one the men morph into moving figures and walk out of the frame; the flag remains and the little girl in red reappears beneath it.
