Simon Preston Gallery
May 4 to June 7, 2014
301 Broome Street
New York, (212) 431-1105

Whitney Biennial 2014
Lobby Installation
May 7 to 11, 2014

Victoria Fu’s first solo exhibition at Simon Preston Gallery is centered primarily around two complex large-format video installations, Belle Captive II and Belle Captive III. These works, like Belle Captive I, which was shown at the Whitney Biennial in early May, are immersive digital projections, created via an overlay of diverse time-based and light-based materials and approaches. In each work, the context/content becomes a mysterious but partially decodable sum larger than its parts.

The three Belle Captive video installations are non-narrative, and the subject matter is hard to distinguish. In Belle Captive II, an ethereal purple-pink atmosphere serves as the constant background of the projected video (this hazy imagery is actually derived from footage that the artist shot of a sunset, on 16mm film). In the foreground we witness people dressed in business-casual attire as they perform certain tasks, and pose in specific interactions with one another. The figurative imagery in this work was culled from commercial stock footage downloaded by the artist over the internet, which she subsequently re-cropped and re-edited. In the six-minute looped piece which is projected on a central wall within the gallery, we watch various actors at both close and medium range as they make sign language gestures, climb up an ascending series of leveled stairs, stand in half circles smiling, and most strikingly, hold large green-screened placards in front of themselves, which render parts of their bodies invisible.

Belle Captive II functions more on an abstract level than as a form of “critique,” associated with the appropriation of found images. The gestures of its borrowed main characters are stripped down to being little more than the actions of human beings within a certain barren digital atmosphere. A surreal dramatic quality takes over, heightened by the consistently-haloed appearance of the green-screened objects and people. A close-cropped smile on one of these characters faces, for instance, implies something different then it ever did in the source material, where it must have been scripted for easy infomercial digestion. Without using any overarching narrative or single dominant technology, the work seems to profile some heightened, futuristic, but closed-off version of reality that exists within its own time-based capabilities.

Belle Captive III, which is situated on the other side of a wall from II, is unpopulated by contrast, containing no characters or recognizably sourced footage. This work seems even more inherently technical than the other videos. It consists of a projection that spills off the wall and onto the floor, containing two-dimensional shapes that are the color and consistency of the sunset-pink imagery found in the other video. Many of the shapes are abstract, but at times others represent the silhouettes of human figures, objects, and settings, some of which appear in Belle Captive I and II. In actuality Belle Captive III was created by recording within a physical set, and with the cut-out shapes we see as props. There is a strange, self-reflexive and iterative quality within the cross-referencing between these works. In comparison to Belle Captive I and II, this piece was created within real time and space . In another sense, though, this video is almost the dry template to the dramatic environs found in the other two Belle Captives. It envisions the digital realm as a stage, and proceeds in two dimensions to block out all the loaded symbols and moments that in the other instances become activated in a digitally-fabricated world.

The exhibition also includes two additional works. There is a 16mm black-and-white film where a mirror held by the single pastorally-situated protagonist occasionally reflects into the camera and washes out the image, and there is a sole photographic work created by documenting the projection of a room’s corner onto the corner itself. These media-based explorations are interesting, but they do not have the immediate reach of the Belle Captive video installations, which aesthetically delve into the reality of a mediated world rather than alluding to it.

Belle Captive I, as it was installed at the Whitney, would seem to be the most all-encompassing realization of this series. As with Belle Captive III, there are nods to the experiential, phenomenological, and disorderly capabilities of video installation. The main projection falls across a small wall in the foreground, then jaunts unevenly onto the wider wall in the background, setting up the sense of a semi-narrative video “framed” within a larger airy video installation.  The mis-en-scene in I is more expansive then the contents of III. The imagery is derived from similar commercial stock footage of business-attired actors, but also includes a range of characters of diverse ages, and footage of specific objects, flora, and fauna. In one memorable montage, a teenage actress drinks a glass of water until she is obscured by a time-lapse of a leafy plant growing. In another, a colorful bird in close focus sits on a hand, followed by a markedly-red tomato that appears in front of an out-of-focus face. The inclusiveness of the material has increased just to the point that the commercial nature of the source footage remains barely evident (one giveaway is that all of the images are “positive”–hands with thumbs up, flowers growing, dog drinking water, child smiling).

Victoria Fu’s practice indulges in media-based content in a similar manner to how Pop artists in the 1960s indulged in the seduction of visual advertising. At the same time, though, the pieces have a distinctly sociological feel. Maybe at heart, the work tries to split the difference. These videos, which share a name with the 1983 avant-garde mystery film directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, attempt to wade into a digital world we are still in the midst of creating, and don’t yet fully understand. 

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November 3 to December 15, 2013

41 Orchard Street
New York City, 212-226-7108

Mike Yaniro’s debut solo show at Room East consists of eleven wall-mounted works, which exist in some cosmological place between drawing, painting, and sculpture. The pieces varyingly traffic in recognizable language, figurative images, and obscure, process-based forms. Ultimately, what keeps them from fitting easily into an established artistic category–especially that of drawing–is the same characteristic that could be said to unite them: a persistent and formally esoteric philosophical logic.

There are four identifiable series in the show. The upstairs gallery features two similarly-sized rectangular text-centric works installed in the center of adjoining walls, and between them, a pair of graphite drawings on paper which portray high-contrast renderings of what appear to be hands and fingers. On a third wall there are two framed works on stretched latex that each crudely depict eight line-drawn versions (or is it stages?) of a caricatured animal-like form. In the downstairs space, four unframed abstractions, also on latex, present a formal and thematic counterpoint to the latter.  In the center two-thirds of these large-sized hanging latex sheets, hazy clusters of rectangular grey impressions have been printed.

In contrast to the majority of word-based art, Yaniro’s pieces are not immediately “readable” on either a conceptual or a linguistic level. In the two examples upstairs and a third downstairs, flat monochrome fields of acrylic (red, beige, and grey) are interspersed with stenciled-out snippets of word-forms, numbers, and punctuation. These figures make little syntactical sense in any way one might try to read them; for instance “URAccato” runs into  “91/151/”, line break: “ADR/rid SPRAY.” Ultimately though, something emerges in their lack of lucidity. A few words or recognizable fragments of words, such as “Spray. “Local.” “Plate.” “Exhau,” seem to reference technical writing and industrial objects. The strangeness of this is complimented by something unorthodox in the facture of the objects; the substrate of the work is off-white PVC plastic sheeting commonly utilized in sign-making, and it shows through where the letter shapes have been masked off.

These pieces are almost commercial signage turned inwards, and an association is bridged between their non-communicativeness as artworks and the ubiquitous world the material and the language comes from. By and large, the works in the show seem to result from something similarly searching and analytical. Just as the red beige and grey pieces fixate on language, other equally abstract works can be said to linger over the dynamics of imagistic representation. The untitled hanging latex pieces downstairs, created through the transfer of xerox toner onto  rubber sheeting, at first glance resemble indefinite printerly accretions. In actuality, the impressions are formed from a mimetic practice in which Yaniro transfers specific images from his personal archive unto the surface of the latex. But this process is an operation that in technical terms doesn’t work; the selected images lose their content, and what we are left with is the distinctive knotty and textured amalgamations of their traces.

The work tests the communicative potential of the subject matter and processes at hand, and in the resulting deformations–in other words, all of the pieces–there is an inherent, latent psychology. This manifests distinctively in the two framed works that feature repetitive drawings of rabbit or snail-like forms, described in thick ink lines (Rickling 1 and Rickling 2, both 2013). The figures are derived from facsimiles of drawings found in a historical book detailing the outlawed practice of psychotherapy in Nazi Germany. Without knowing the charged images’ meaning or derivation, Yaniro has reproduced it in a manner that builds on its mysterious but purportedly therapeutic back-story.

It is not easy to delineate a single meaning or endpoint to the work.  Potential references and intimations of emotion cycle through it in spite of the austerity. But as is the case with the Rickling drawings, the art inhabits a crossing-place between culture, the objects found in the wider world, and an individual’s cogitation of symbols, images, and messages. This all stands somewhat in contrast to the seductive and purportedly meaningful surfaces that seems to dominate the work of many young artists. Yaniro uses language and images to conflate symbol with gesture in a way that palpably relates to Jasper Johns’ maps, flags, and cast faces. Another artist called to mind is Bruce Nauman, whose work seems also to prevalently break down communication, most often to the underlying human urgencies of internalizing and externalizing.

Yaniro’s work could also be said to advance a root awareness of the borders of a self. The most clearly defined figurative representations in the show can be understood as a coda to this idea. The drawings Caric 1 and Caric 2 (both 2013) depict close-ups of fingers and sharply defined fingernails in the midst of uncertain tasks or gestures.  Because of something strange and clinical in the perspective, what should be familiar and human appears foreign and uninhabited. The image is clear and isolated but the subject is deconstructed.

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