Review

A review of Barry Anderson's Ectoplasmic Response, Sonya Blesofsky's Dis/Integrations, and Casey Jex Smith's Stock Up On Heal and Mana Potions

Barry Anderson, still from "Ectoplasmic Response," HD video projection with 50 speakers, speaker wire, and four surround-sound amplifiers. Image: courtesy of the artist

Swarm Gallery
Oakland, California
January 30 – March 14, 2010

Newer works by Barry Anderson, Sonya Blesofsky, and Casey Jex Smith, currently on view at Swarm Gallery in Oakland, California, ruminate on personal mythology and the power of the stuff of life to create and shape our more intangible notion of our lives and ourselves.

Casey Jex Smith, "Lehi's Vision," pen on paper, 60" x 80", 2009. Image: courtesy of the gallery and artist

Stock Up On Heal and Mana Potions, Smith's series of ink and colored pencil drawings on paper, borrows freely from art history, science fiction, and religious imagery. These surreal landscapes and figures bring to mind Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers all at once — and, more interestingly, illuminate the visual intersection between these seemingly disparate cultural icons. What results is a visual iconography that feels both like a product of personal nostalgia and an emblem of the current cultural zeitgeist of the "mash-up." However, Smith doesn't take us much beyond the mash-up and, while his own memories are hinted at, the artist recedes into the background so much that these delicate works on paper begin to fall flat.

Barry Anderson, installation view of "Ectoplasmic Response," (created 2009) HD video projection with 50 speakers, speaker wire, and four surround-sound amplifiers, at Swarm Gallery in 2010. Image: courtesy of the artist

Anderson's Ectoplasmic Response parodies 20th-century images of ectoplasmic discharge, an offshoot of spirit photography (and seems to both indulge in and poke fun at the recently reinvigorated interest in spirit photography among artists and curators, as well). Acting as a kind of indirect self-portrait, the piece also references a serious bout of nosebleeds that Anderson experienced, which partially inspired the idea for the piece. This parody takes the form of an immersive environment, consisting of a single-channel digital video of a mock-ectoplasm (the nosebleed) and many raw wall-mounted speakers snaking through Swarm Gallery’s Project Space on wires like vines. Ghostly images of barely recognizable cartoons, movie stars, the artist’s wife and son, and parts of his own past work float up and out of view, each contained in individual droplets of blood. The images are paired with free-flowing audio samples, including both personal and popular sounds that hold personal meaning for the artist.

Barry Anderson, "Ectoplasmic Response," (created 2009), video installation at Swarm Gallery, Oakland, California, 2010. Image: courtesy of the gallery and artist

These samples are abstracted to the point that together they create a surreal, yet oddly familiar, environment. They are merely subtle hints of the familiar, recalling what's already part of our psyche, without explicitly referencing movies, cartoons, and radio shows in any tangible way. Self-referential elements are interwoven so that we are able to sink into Anderson’s mind as if in our own daydream. The effect is like reverse subliminal messaging — or maybe more like regurgitated subliminal messaging — making us aware of the tropes of our collective unconscious and the intersections between personal mythologies, but just barely. This subtle effect strikes the perfect balance between familiarity and strangeness. Visually, the video relates to the work of artists (such as New Yorker Shana Moulton) who use cheesy digital effects and flamboyant color palates to simultaneously unseat their viewers and make them laugh. The experience of this work is more participatory than passive; the video is hypnotic, and each speaker transmits its own channel of sound, forcing me to move around constantly to keep up with each one. Once I realize that there is a rhythm to my own movement in the small Project Space, chasing obscured sounds, I learn how the piece works.

Sonya Blesofsky, "Oakland Billboard," vellum, tape and glue, 111" x 105" x 31" inches, 2010. Image: courtesy of the gallery and artist

The work of Anderson and Smith have a clear but not overly prescriptive relationship, while the inclusion of Blesofsky's paper monuments to downtown Oakland's architecture and urban landscape feel like an afterthought. Visually, they make sense next to Smith's mostly white works on paper, but the pairing seems tenuous. However, looking at Smith's drawings and listening to the beeps and blips wafting out of the Project Space from Anderson's installation (and humming under my breath to Fleetwood Mac, coming from the gallery office), I am moved to consider the incredible impact that media — in the form of advertising, TV shows, pop music, movies, and so on — has not only on our understanding of our own world, but on the formation of our individual notion of spirituality.

Barry Anderson, still from "Ectoplasmic Response," HD video projection (created 2009) with 50 speakers, speaker wire, and four surround-sound amplifiers, at Swarm Gallery. Image: courtesy of the artist

I wonder if Anderson and Smith mean to illustrate contemporary collective memory, or if these pieces are more idiosyncratic and personal than that. If they are getting at some kind of collective experience, we know that it can look many different ways, but what is it? It seems that, even while Smith's and Anderson's aesthetic sensibilities differ, they convey remarkably similar fascinations. This may be an indication of the tiny cross-section of the world that these artists represent, or it may just be something floating in the air.

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