Alix Pearlstein "The Drawing Lesson"
On Stellar Rays
This event has ended.
On Stellar Rays presents two new videos by Alix Pearlstein, The Drawing Lesson and Moves in the Field, in the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. A third related video, Light, will be on view in the gallery office. In her new work, Pearlstein exploits acts of spectatorship among individuals, isolating a dialectical engagement of movement, observation and reception.
Moves in the Field refers to elements of figure skating that emphasize basic skills and edge control, or more broadly, a set of progressively difficult skill tests. Working with a group of actors, Pearlstein employs a similar approach. By means of a finite set of instructions, she directs schematic interactions to highlight the moments when the psychological and the spatial overlap. The anti-spectacular situation, seemingly devoid of narrative or contextual cues, activates a range of potential scenarios ubiquitous to the intake of cultural media.
As in Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin’s L'étude du dessin (1734), Pearlstein’s eponomously-titled video exploits a succession of gazes in a sparse room to delineate shifting roles between observer and observed. In one scene the camera circles a pair of seated figures each directly facing the other. Their attention soon shifts to closely follow the camera’s eye. Subsequent scenes enact a relay of exchanging positions between three, then four figures. Through each configuration actors observe the same pattern, alternately shifting their gaze to regard each other or the camera as it repeatedly draws circles around the group tableaux.
Though legacies of minimalism and postmodern dance are often a pretext for Pearlstein’s work, at the core she exploits their antithetical ruse - an intentional self-consciousness and psychological pressure - towards generating an affective relationship between camera, viewer and subject. Ultimately a form of raw humanism prevails over the sort of scrutiny and invasiveness that exists in much current contemporary media.
Media
Schedule
from September 09, 2012 to October 21, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-09-09 from 18:00 to 20:00