Isabelle Gresser installations, drawings and
videos at UPS
Published in the Weekly Volcano, April 6, 2017
 |
| Video still and drawing in ink on newsprint by Isabelle Gresser, courtesy Kittredge Gallery |
All
the way from Berlin, Germany, comes multi-dimensional artist Isabelle Gresser
with a multi-media installation on the theme of pine trees, humanity, and
international cultures. There are multiple videos with found footage and
brilliant editing, drawings, photographs, and one wall featuring student work
from a project called Nocturn Encounters:
Utopian Affirmation, wherein the students came together for a few hours to
exchange ideas and make drawings and print poems and other works on paper and
attach them to the gallery wall.
Gresser’s
video work is inspirational and filled with a density of ideas expressed
through a variety of video techniques combined with music and literature,
including quotes from many famous poets and novelists. Her videos are stunningly
beautiful.
The
drawings, both Gresser’s and those by the students, are mostly sketchy and
often crudely executed. The best are from a group of small drawings in glass
cases along with photographs, and passages from poems and other literary works.
There
are five large video works, some projected on large screens and some shown on
monitors, all with head phones for listening to accompanying music and poetry.
All place modern life, mostly urban, in natural scenes to present complex looks
into various cultures and mankind’s relation to both natural and built worlds.
“Nietzsche
at Nice” is a surrealistic video that pictures a large video screen (a video
within a video) set up on what appears to a boardwalk overlooking the beach at
the French town of Nice. On the beach are two sunbathers, one male and one
female. A Jeep drives by where sand meets ocean, and an airline flies overhead.
A huge cruise ship slowly traverses the scene. Two spacemen appear on the beach
next to the sunbathing man. It is a moment wherein reality and unreality meet —
the essence of surrealism.
“Iris
2.0” is a smaller video with a Renaissance-style portrait of a woman whose face
continuously deconstructs and morphs into various abstract patterns as it is
overlaid with concentric circles, geometric patterns, prisms, and a more
modernistic collage-like rendering of the mouth of an archetypical model with a
toothy smile superimposed over the Renaissance woman’s mouth. The model’s
mouth, which is beautiful by most modern standards, becomes horrifying in this
image.
“Smart
Seoul Poem” is a video of a street scene in Korea. On the street, there is a
wall with a mural painted on it. The mural is of trees, and in front of the
wall are actual trees which look so much like the painted trees that the only
way to tell the difference is to notice how trunks of the painted trees are cut
off sharply at the top edge of the wall. Behind the wall is a building under
construction. Pedestrians walk past, and some of them fade into shadowy ghost
figures. You can see through them. It is a poem in motion.
The
other videos are equally intriguing, with multiple meanings and many beautiful
and startling special effects.
Showing
in the smaller back gallery is Painting
the National Parks: Preserving A.W. Hill's Experience, an
exhibition of landscape paintings from the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and
30s by Abby Williams Hills, a popular artist at the time who lived and worked
in Tacoma.
No comments:
Post a Comment