ART-ZINE REFLECT


REFLECT... КУАДУСЕШЩТ # 18 ::: ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


Kolter M. CAMPBELL. A WHIRLWIND OF SHAPE AND COLOR



aвтор визуальной работы - E.Zeltsman



I arrived at a Wicker Park bar on a chilly autumn evening for a monthly “sound salon” presented by Pistil Magazine, unsure as to exactly what a “sound salon” was. I didn’t like the place, with its light thin woodwork, and indigo lighting scheme. The crowd seemed to be there mainly to be checked out, gossip, and look cool. I got a beer. At least it was reasonably priced. The planned focus of this “salon” was the live “spinning” of records by a DJ, but the films of Jill L. Wissmiller, projected as accompaniment, far surpassed the music with their mesmerizing and heterogeneous dance of images, their whirlwind of color and shape.
The audience rustled in anticipation, though shortly the bright red curtain was pulled back. An animated Barbie, her breasts exposed, and clad in a gold and red bedazzled jumpsuit, her brain grafted onto her platinum blonde hair, strives forward on a treadmill, and the show begins.
A montage of colors and textures, shapes shifting, multiple planes appearing and disappearing, and gradually flowers materialize from the swirling pinks, greens and yellows. Something like broken shards of gold exist with and beyond the flowers gentle dance, becoming more and more aggressive until bombed out floors emerge and lead to black.
A multitude of eggs, white against green turf, stretch endless, shadows passing above them, a contrasting dynamic of white and black on green. The camera tilts to reveal a woman’s desiring gaze, her hand achingly gropes her large black muff, and time slowed fingers drip with honey. Cut into this, half-circular camera movements of beehives, a multiplication of honey combs before the beekeeper, smoke billowing as from a censor, the bees everywhere – entrenched in their catacombs, in flight, and a montage wherein the time captured, fixed, past, pulses backwards in the present, reverberating in the present, undoing itself in time, like the slow golden amber drizzle of honey that desaturates itself into a cold, almost gray tawniness.
Nine very yellow lemons in sets of three vanish and reappear and vanish again against a baby blue tile. A tracking shot of the Illinois summer leads to the Las Vegas Apocalypse. On your knees. Can’t be. Miss America. With scars. Repeated and intercut with neon cowgirl signs and porno actresses as the Faithful await the rapture under the mirrored casino lights.
Intense close-ups of fish lead to black film leader, sewn-on and projected – a pattern of butterflies or sparrows mating in flight, perhaps a spinal cord. The insane eyes of chickens, the texture of their red faces pierced with tiny white feathers, the coop wire, and the matching patterns amongst the feathers. A kaleidoscope of trains and the earth, which between shifts in vertical and horizontal motion gives the impression of the world widening outwards. Trees come to resemble stained glass or spider into snowflake patterns. A carving of a ham gives way to hand painted film that becomes consumed with cigarette burns.
The woman reappears, her fascinated gaze now affixed to a hatchet blade. Pink paper flowers twitter – part of a screaming human piñata being fondled before a blizzard of confetti fades them out.
Again, the endless eggs – the light this time washing them out. One is smashed by human hands, reveling in the yolk. Thousands of pink feet dance across the screen, the piñata flutters its rainbow eyelashes.
Jellyfish pulse in the void like ghostly brains from another time.
Dear antlers adorn a wood paneled room like Christ’s crown, watched by the wise dead eyes of petrified deer heads.
A rhythmic and sensual montage of a belly dancer’s hips, stomach, hands, hair flowing about her neck, around her the camera twists, almost serpentine. And a little girl, perplexed by the bumps on Barbie’s chest, decides to reinvent her toy to be more like herself, rubbing her shirtless on the sidewalk.
Repeating eyes or nipples of fruit, reminiscent of the warehouse of Masumura’s blind sculptor, returns us to the bombed out floors, bestrewn with teeth and shreds of barbed wire, blood stains, vats from a torture chamber, shoes left empty on a dirty floor.
Ms. Wissmiller’s work ruminates on motion and gestation, the shadow of death though is present. Between color and texture these issues are communicated, and the editing links them, the editing becomes a way of pondering. Look at the manipulations of time in the editing, particularly as regards the return of images already seen, as in the beehive sequence; or the look of faces – in anxious anticipation, bemused absorption, or fixed desire – this is growth and waiting. The use of bodies, be they animated or actual, human or otherwise, “live” or re-re-recorded, and the textures of everything from the swirling flowers to the shards of teeth (Ms. Wissmiller has an excellent eye for texture – she used to be a weaver, and screen her various works upon her fabric creations). I’m not sure if it’s fair to attribute an architectural-narrative reading, the film is a visual music, whose phrases and motifs are grasped in a more intuitive fashion. It is perhaps more akin to watching dance, where the whirling of bodies in time communicates something extra-rational, but it is certainly something worth seeing, and more than once. She has promised a screening of new works sometime in November.






 следующая Elvina ZELTSMAN, Rafael LEVCHIN. FESTIVAL AND ARRABAL…
оглавление
предыдущая Sergey LЕVCHIN. Весь поэт на одном тире...





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