In the late 19th century, at the dawn of the electric age, famous spiritualists traveled the country selling the promise of contact with “the other side.” An interest in unseen, possibly supernatural, energies developed apace with the introduction of electricity, that invisible force illuminating the night and animating formerly lifeless objects. In 2016, I thought of this legacy as I stepped into Timeless Motion, a multimedia exhibition of local moving image artists currently on view at San Francisco’s SOMArts.
The first piece in the gallery is Scott Stark’s Low-Res Arborscope, a wasteland as gray as Dorothy’s Kansas inhabited by a forest of dead tree parts. On one end a projector shoots its images toward slats of wood swinging in a fan’s breeze. The light that spills around the edges of this moving screen generates a force field, a no-go zone created by either the forbidding nature of the lifeless detritus or the perceived inviolability of art in a gallery setting. Whatever the cause and whatever the purpose, one begins to think post-apocalyptically of disasters in the making and what will be left behind.
This piece (though not my favorite in the show) effectively promotes Timeless Motion’s thesis, creating a dead space in the middle of the gallery with clearly permeable borders between past, present and a possible future. The landscape, already harsh, is made more forbidding with the addition of electric light, which both illuminates and defines the installation as a kind of afterlife.
In stark contrast (no pun intended, Scott), Paul Clipson’s 16mm film FUNERA ET SERPENTIUM soothes the eye and calms the nervous system. Clipson works exclusively in celluloid, generating gorgeous multi-colored and multi-layered images with in-camera effects. His world seems populated with visual delight, which he eagerly captures and shares. The warmth of Clipson’s photographic process, even when the imagery is of cityscapes and electric light patterns, fosters an organic feeling, a celebration of human activity that feels positive — a kind of communion with both the natural world and the built environment.
In two other closed-off sections of the gallery, viewers encounter the sublime with Kerry Laitala’s The Retrospectroscope and The Cosmoscope, kinetic sculptures creating mind-bending worlds that threaten to engulf and destroy. Signs warn the viewer to beware of possible seizure-inducing effects before entering into the tiny curtained rooms where dangerous disks (exploded zoetropes, 19th-century inventions that predicted cinema) swirl in front of strobe lights.
The combination of cramped space, swirling motion and flashing lights created instant nausea for me. Laitala’s works offered an experience of beauty ultimately denied (to me) by their own dangerous nature. Another 19th-century allusion came to mind — that of a medicine man offering cures but selling poisons.