Jennifer and Kevin McCoy: Every Shot, Every Episode
Jason Salavon: Crossbred and Crystalline
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Consider the work of Mark Lombardi, who had a show here at the Bona Fide Gallery in 2000: he puts his research on corrupt corporate links on the wall in detailed diagrammatic drawings, such as George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stephens (1999), which maps the relationships of various bankers and oil dealers over a period of more than ten years. In other conceptual works, it’s not the research that’s on the wall (or in a curator’s essay) but the technical route the artist took to create the work–what might be called its back story in the lingo of the high concept crowd. The pieces in these current exhibits depend on the contrast between what you see on the wall and what you know about how it got there. The question is whether the stories behind these artworks remaking Hollywood and TV are more compelling than the works themselves.
Mirra reduces Griffith’s original masterpiece to a rather thin sensory experience. Sitting in the nearly lighttight space, I found more drama in a staff person opening the bathroom door than I did in Mirra’s fleeting projections: suddenly a chiaroscuro bolt of light ruptured the installation.
Salavon imposes a similar leveling device on a DVD of the first episode of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in his video installation Everything, All at Once (Part II). Here his program averages each frame’s color and flattens the frame into a single horizontal scan line projected on a white wall. One on top of another the lines scroll downward from the ceiling to the floor in a cascade. The software acts like the shuttle on a loom, sorting and weaving subtly shifting color fields. Salavon has placed a small television monitor outside the space so you can compare the normal signal from the DVD with his remake. But clearly he’s singlemindedly oblivious to the intent of pop-culture artists, divining a less obvious beauty in their output.
