Meditations on Movement
MONA
7 North Saginaw
The Arts Building
www.detroitmona.com
248-210-7560
Thurs – Sat, 12-6pm
July 15 through August 13, 2005

The purposeful juxtaposition of two ordinary materials to create the extraordinary from the ordinary is one of art’s creative strengths and most difficult challenges. Whether this concerns a touch of color applied to a previously blank surface, as has been done for ages, or some combination of new materials, a creative act so simple, can yet be one capable of great expression. “Meditations on Movement,” at the Museum of New Art, offers several excellent instances of this transformative power.

Andrew Simsak’s untitled “sleeping bag” construction stands out as a compelling testament to the creation of something extraordinary out of the ordinary – in this case a quick trip to the hardware store for materials. Even the form itself is ordinary – yet its effect on viewers is far more than the sum of the parts would imply. Simsak created the sleeping bag form by a continuous coiling of clear flexible plastic tubing (ala basket weaving) held together with small zip ties. To this he attached a water source which circulates through the length of the tubing. And so it appears as something liquid, yet the plastic tubing and extruding zip tie ends create a hard external appearance – not unlike a living organism – which could be said to be a(n extremely) sophisticated water vessel.

The form elicits numerous and varied responses: to some it resembles prickly sea life (an impression made so by the zip tie ends providing for this quilled appearance and the inspired lighting, which gives it an almost internal glow common in such undersea critters), a cellular organism, a sensory deprivation tank, a cocoon. This final interpretation offers further dialogue as it was built large enough for the artist to fit (and on opening night this reviewer was fortunate enough to get a turn to squeeze into it as well.) Being inside produces an odd sensation, at once cramped within the piece itself and within the room filled with people, at the same time it feels as if the gallery has been left behind completely, and that the light and noise filtering through were somehow much farther away than they actually were. Emerging, struggling to pull one’s body out of the narrow opening (obviously one might also think of this as a womb), becomes an act of birth (or rebirth into a new stage of life.) The metamorphosis of the cocoon is a metaphor for the metamorphical power of art. Simsak describes his work as being, “born from this yearning to transform.” And here, he’s created such a transformation of raw materials into something much more and simultaneously a vessel to aid in one’s own transformation.

From equally simple materials – cloth, string, and pulleys – Amanda Hatch has made building puppets. Even without seeing them animated, one could imagine their delightful dance. But their titles, “ghost buildings” and “population shift,” reveal that Hatch has much more going on than anthropomorphic architecture. By making such seemingly permanent structures as buildings out of cloth and subject to being raised and collapsing once again, Hatch offers commentary about the fragile nature of the urban environment-subject to the ebb and flow of its human inhabitants. This is of particular poignancy on display in Pontiac and Detroit – where buildings stand deserted and demolition is a televised spectacle, and the questions of how to keep a city healthy need better solutions.

Jeffrey Schweitzer, who served as curator for this exhibition and brought together a terrific body of artists, offers up commentary of a different sort concerning our own personal image. The tools he uses are simple (by today’s technological standards) – a combination of drawn imagery, written text, voiceover, the insertion of his own image, and popular old songs all spun together in video to absurdly humorous but serious effect. Like Hatch’s buildings, Schweitzer’s videos seek to point out the fluid nature of our own identities.

Lest we forget, the show is titled “Meditations on Movement,” and while the previously mentioned pieces each possess an element of motion, Matt Monroe’s, “Swaying Straws” is all about movement. The piece consists of a wooden seat amidst a sea of plastic straws sticking up like reeds in a lake. A switch sets the straws in motion, all moving in unison. The combination of the moving straws and the sound they make while swaying back and for creates a nice illusion of motion, perhaps a bit unsettling for those prone to seasickness. The feeling of movement while sitting still – perhaps it’s more than a leap to equate this with the relativity of all our motion. But regardless this work brings out the unexpected and makes us look just a bit differently at everyday things around us.

And this lies at the heart of what art can be – a way to look at the familiar with new eyes. To quote Alan Moore from the Watchmen, “we gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another’s vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.”

        

One final piece of work speaks directly to Moore’s observation. Cynthia Randolph’s “Bed Lines,” are photographic stills from a video in which every morning for nine months she photographed the state of her bed linens. To be sure, as everyday occurrences go, this is about as commonplace as one can get. We get up, get out of bed (“drag a comb across our head” ) and we go about our day. Randolph’s work illuminates something beautiful in that routine of a day in our lives that for the most part likely escapes our notice (not to mention the beauty in the black and white photographs just as straight images). This is, in her words, an attempt, “to transcend the habits of our daily lives. I believe that when we slow down and really see, we lengthen and deepen the experience of our lives….”

Randolph’s work shares much with James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses,” an account of a single, rather ordinary day of a man detailed in epic proportion. Joyce devotes an entire (extremely dense) page of text to the turning on of a water faucet. Everything is related from the network of pipes bringing the water from the spring to the folks who originally tapped that water source. From this perspective, we can see the complexity involved in even the most mundane. And thus we’ve come full circle – the artist’s eye and mind turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and through their eyes we can be awakened to a new perspective on our world. These artists (along with several other artists in the show who didn’t get mentioned in this write-up) offer many wonders to look at and a way to look at our world with renewed wonder. – Nick Sousanis

THE DETROITER.com