Sara Ishii, Breaking the ice, 2005, video still
Reality Bytes at the Dallas Contemporary
Through May 19
A person's experience of time today, so parsed and chopped because of the speed of digital technology, steadily departs from the solidity and reliability of historic temporal experience. Reality Bytes, a collection of looped video works, emphasizes the apparent pointlessness of linear chronology in ten markedly different episodes projected upon the darkened gallery walls of the Dallas Contemporary. The curators, John Pomara, Dean Terry and Joan Davidow, present a somewhat evolved reading of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope--quoted in gallery literature as describing "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships"--and present the works as examples of "chronotopic specificity" to aid in the viewer's understanding.
The exhibition is accessible, informative and seems to fit easily in a recently fashioned pattern of public knowledge. In the mainstream film industry over the last twenty years, there have been a number of popular departures in chronology--from Quentin Tarantino's disjointed narratives to Michel Gondry's more nascent studies of the fractured nature of the subconscious--but in a gallery or museum, a confrontation of temporal continuity seems a necessary point of interest for the video artist and the viewing public alike, as the medium becomes increasingly applied.
The large spaces of The Contemporary are ideal for displaying large projections of video. Though I feel the more effective examples of this "insulated temporality" were given the most prominent positions, there is an implication of choosing one's own course among the works and inevitably (in a crude curator's joke) losing track of time. The deconstruction is playful. I began with the large 'faunal-domestic' chronotope, Corinna Schnitt's Once Upon a Time (2006). In Schnitt's twenty-minute loop, barnyard animals of increasing size gradually terrorize a quaint domestic space devoid of humans, tearing apart house-plants and filthying carpets. Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand's take on post-coital morning rituals in Coffee & Milk (2006)--the "morning-mulling" chronotope--appears opposite. Its position amplifies its premise; two mouths slurp from pools of coffee and milk, dirtied with unmelted sugar and black grounds, in an apparently autobiographical deconstruction of the couple's breakfast table.
The inherent absurdity of placing oneself between a time-space of endless environmentalism and another of exploded minutiae creates an unintentional juxtaposition. Similar exchanges occur elsewhere: there is a sort of digitized liminality spliced with social commentary between Noah Simblist's Diary of the Displaced (2006) and Michael Bell-Smith's "digital-urban" chronotope Top of the World (2005). Conversely, a thick atmosphere of mundanity that calmly emphasizes gender and commoditization is encountered between Sara Ishii's A Small Shoe Collection (2005) and Brian Edwards' Kix (2006).
Themes become unexpectedly contiguous once others are experienced. Encountered works deny an expected perception of finality; their enlarged premises bleed and blur. Time lengths are dramatically staggered (from seconds to an entire hour) and one's experience depends entirely upon which point one enters to cycle the gallery. This play of interaction and cohesion is a primary curiosity. While each of the ten chronotopes run in intentional disorder, there is a progressively shifting "grand narrative" of the exhibition that simply cannot be avoided by any tricks of temporal reversal or isolation. Reality Bytes therefore exists as a chronotope in itself: a machine of timelessness.
Christopher Balla studies art history at the University of North Texas.
Please contact exhibit@thecontemporary.net
