Christina Mamakos & Huang Ruo "Water’s Wet"
The Chelsea Art Museum
This event has ended.
Using video to capture images as tableaus of matter, artist Christina Mamakos approaches the surface of the sea from below. With a simple hand-held digital camera in waterproof casing, Mamakos collects and links a series of unmanipulated images of water as a membrane viewed from beneath, to form what can be considered a painterly use of the moving image. Transparency becomes a screen of projected textures, tones and ambiguous forms capturing reflections that become the reflected, recording images that become almost a perceptual living entity -- an imagined or present creature – the specter of the sea. From an uncontrollable miasma of formlessness, a creature begins to crawl, born of a sequence of images that transforms the vision of an organic form into a character itself. Water is conjured as genitive, the name of someone or something that is itself, a defiant personification. And its wetness becomes a possession, an object owned by this creature. From this view, an organic integration emergences, a visual response to composer Huang Ruo’s technique of “dimensionalism.” Using an inventive musical voice which draws equal inspiration from Chinese folk, Western avant-garde, rock, and jazz, Ruo creates a seamless series of musical works that do not necessarily exist in the sound world of our daily life. Ruo’s Chinese Folk Rock engages an otherworldly human voice, his orchestra of beer bottles animates a different world, both of and beyond familiar musical sound. Together they become the sound fabric and skin of the creature Water, the echo and shadow of the specter of the sea. This visual / sound installation constructs a multi-dimensional space where images and sound flow from one another in response to one another, evoking a character that is at once recognizable as an element of nature, and still an unknown yet unambiguous creature with a voice, a language and a will.
Media
Schedule
from June 25, 2010 to July 24, 2010