Los Angeles – It was 65 degrees and Sunny the day I visited TerrorAn exhibition of the work by Ana Mendieta, Derek Jarman and P. staff organized in two chambers in Del Vaz projects. Between the entrance and the gallery door is a courtyard with a terracotta fountain, a mass of jasmine with nocturnal flowering and an inclined lemon tree. Meeting the video installation with five hallucinating staff of staff in any context would be a shocking experience. But passing the patio filled with sun in a small dark room that strikes with the noise of rotary and strobing propellers with fluorescent lights, fingering texts and dizzying colorful discs precipitate a dislocation of another order. To begin with, your eyes, unable to adapt to sudden darkness or with a harsh light, become temporarily blind. Then, with the film playing through five LED holographic fans, there is a range of ocular disturbances: coroscrap spots, electrical load sparks, a feeling of construction pressure. The lights seem to pass through you, leaving visual scars in their place.
The video of the staff “in ektase” (2023) displays a poem shown word by word, line by line, regularly interrupted by flashes of radioactive pink drawings and lines of explosive sun. Disjunctive sentences like “descend slowly more deeply in hell / with speed” and “the weight of reality, like tragedy / gravity, are inevitably” followed by the repetition of words “I am alive / You are dead”. After five minutes, the blades stop turning and the lights rose until the film starts again. In this new context, static fans who could otherwise be considered as CVC equipment seems threatening, as weapons – this is perhaps the point. Similarly to the other film's film works, the installation is intended to affect a dysphoric and dissociated state recalling that the queer and trans bodies are regularly subjected by social systems of violence and oppression.
A spectral emotion rises above the four photographs of Mendieta on the adjacent wall. Like glow, images of her Silhouette (1973–80) Visualize the presence of absence. In “Untitled: Silueta Series” (1978), a flower vine added a barely perceptible silhouette against a tree trunk, and in “Untitled: Silueta Series” (c. 1980), the igne rock rocks a built -in silhouette covered with a biolumine foam. In the second room, the disembodied body is animated on a super 8 mm film in “Untitled (Silueta Series)” (1978). During the three -minute video duration, a silhouette linked to white barrel powder burns in ashes while a smoke crown transports the silhouette to the atmosphere.
There are no burn scars or smoke plumes in the five jarman assembly paintings presented in the presentation, only evidence of the alchemical properties of Heat. The canvases are started with lead, golden and covered with thick layers of tar of tar and black oil. Jarmen organized the different items found – prayer books, driftwood, nails, cartridges, alliances and broken glass leaves – at the top of the viscous substrate while it bubbed, permanently fixing them to the surface while it was drying. Brown black rectangles resemble voids in which the detritus of this world have been sunk. Or maybe they are portals in another world, where objects are free from the resonances they wear here, such as prosecution, pain or shame.
Audre Lorde referred to the planaries, the small self-managing animal species which send an electrical load in the form of their cut or damaged members, in the context of its summons to consider the future that we want to live. Artists in TerrorAlso, draws our attention to the negative space. They ask us to recognize the loss and to count with the evil that has been done – but also to see the countless possibilities of fully modifying the form.
Earthshake: The Ana Tonenament, Derek Jarrman and P. Stoff Continue to Del Vaz Projects (259 19th Street, Santa Monica, California) until April 18.
