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The experience of video art is becoming closer to film in order to tap into art’s powerful transportative quality. Including the drama and suspense of film, as well as a dry documentary-style, video projection and video installation aims to be interactive or overwhelming quality, comparable to an IMAX experience. A total art experience is afforded using long, slow, often abstract video along with art installation. Griminesa Amoros’ multimedia installation exhibit at the Longwood Art Gallery shows voyages to extreme northern icy regions as well as the place of its art show, the Bronx. Amoros’ separately filmed videos in Iceland and Norway are shown in two gallery rooms. |
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Traveling to Collapse Space – Alison Levy
The experience of video art is becoming closer to film in order to tap into art’s powerful transportative quality. Including the drama and suspense of film, as well as a dry documentary-style, video projection and video installation aims to be interactive or overwhelming quality, comparable to an IMAX experience. A total art experience is afforded using long, slow, often abstract video along with art installation. Griminesa Amoros’ multimedia installation exhibit at the Longwood Art Gallery shows voyages to extreme northern icy regions as well as the place of its art show, the Bronx. Amoros’ separately filmed videos in Iceland and Norway are shown in two gallery rooms. The videos are interconnected and interwoven with the sculpture in the galleries, and have an abstract and narrative character, and gripping sound—created by collaborations with musicians. Amoros was born in Peru, and currently lives in New York; her installations are reflective of the Bronx, Iceland and Norway, which the audience experiences via her mesmerizing camera shots. Visceral and gentle, ethnographic and visually enticing, the meaning of her videos is open to the viewer’s personal experience.
Amoros’ video Between Heaven and Earth films the Bronx’s low-income urban buildings and the Fjord mountains in Norway. Surrealist and beautiful, with haunting world music, Amoros’ camera technique gives an exploratory experience. The view swoops like an IMAX movie and the moans of fellow Peruvian singer Susana Baca tie the variant places together. The sculpture in the room with Between Heaven and Earth is more related to the video in the other room, Rootless Algas. Rootless Algas, done in her signature dreamlike style, depicts Amoros’ family visiting Iceland, first approaching the land via boat. The arrival seems alienated due to the way the camera pans the nearly desolate buildings and land—we catch a head popping out from behind a building only to disregard our gaze. The second half of the video shows Griminesa and her daughter on the beach of rocks and algae. By zooming close into the algae and blending it with her daughter’s wild and wavy hair, Griminesa creates a comparison of algae as a symbol of youthful freedom and energy. Hung in connective strips, the sculptural component of Rootless Algas takes up much of the gallery space. The sculpture hugs the space where the audience watches the video, bringing a real life presence to balance the surreal abstraction in the video.
The sculpture near Between Heaven and Earth appears as different forms of algae. One work is of wavy upside-down letter "U" forms hung on the wall in a mountain shape. Referring to the living spaces in the video Between Heaven and Earth, these forms also look like hair, or wig shapes, which relates to Amoros’ daughter in Rootless Algas. Their material appears quite guttural and together the group appears like portraits hung on the wall. In this context, the sculpture reflects human life, even though individually the "U’s" appear stiff, like lifeless wigs. Together, the different sculptures reference algae, which can exist as a single-celled life form, signifying an infusion of life made manifest. The various algae shapes are strong community symbols.
In front of this grouping, the viewer peers down onto a video projected onto the floor. A short loop of a tide rolling in, revealing a sea of human faces which morph into skulls among the rocks. Projected beneath the "wigs," this projection gives feeling of peering into a pool of our collective inevitable fate– its quickness speeding death and skipping any life. Near this projection is a sculptural vessel playing the soundtrack to Between Heaven and Earth. On a mound of sand a few feet in length, a few dozen flat algae shapes are stacked on top of each other, too high to peer down into. The shapes resemble an outline of a body, or they could signify two of the wig-shaped algae’s joined together. As a burial mound shape, the individual pieces of algae are like many bodies, again reminding the viewer of the collective. This reflection on communities may be Amoros seeing the infinite within the individual. The materiality and close distance of the sculpture invites the entrance of mortality the playing field.
Amoros’ states that she feels unattached to one specific land. Congruently, her artworks showcase a drifting sensibility which considers that people live different lifestyles. Filmed from an outsider’s perspective, the work surrealistically encounters the "other". Perhaps to balance this social vertigo, Amoros’ sculptures directs the movement of the viewers, or is at least attentive to their movement and direction. From water, ice, to what is often considered urban blight, to remote mountains, Amoros’ recontextualizes these places as homes, from a close-up, but outsider view. As the Earth includes an infinite amount of lifestyle choices, Amoros’ view is one which discovers different lifestyles, creating a space for the viewer to find acceptance.
Amoros’ videos show how place in connected to the social context; even if the seemingly chilly environments of the Projects or mountains don’t suggest the motherly role, generations of families carry on within these settings. The children of the Fjords and the children of the Projects have related concerns in life even if their barriers are different. Home is found in these sheltered and cooped up places. The social distance and remove in the video are because Amoros is concerned with the ebb and flow of life, and the continual change that is all around us. No matter how much we try to hold on, we are all rootless algae.
