| “This is 14th Street Union Square: Transfers available to the N,Q,R,W, 4, 5, and 6 trains. Stand clear of the closing doors please.” —Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City Visualizing a system of transport or commerce emphasizes the overall pattern of activity, rather than the action of one individual. Operating collectively, repeating and falling in the steps of those who preceded us, we are comforted by regular cycles. Fashioned by architects, city planners, lawmakers and scientists, structures are created to navigate our increasingly complex world. |
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June Bum Park & Pacual Sisto:Video and Modern Patterns of Control – Laura Blereau
“This is 14th Street Union Square: Transfers available to the N,Q,R,W, 4, 5, and 6 trains. Stand clear of the closing doors please.”
—Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City
Visualizing a system of transport or commerce emphasizes the overall pattern of activity, rather than the action of one individual. Operating collectively, repeating and falling in the steps of those who preceded us, we are comforted by regular cycles. Fashioned by architects, city planners, lawmakers and scientists, structures are created to navigate our increasingly complex world.
“Video and Modern Patterns of Control” is an exhibition that creates a visual conversation between two artists—one from Korea, and another from Spain. Modern rituals—those that take place on pedestrian crosswalks, in cars along the freeway, in parking lots and in urban high-rise developments—are the kinds of subjects attracting the lenses of both June Bum Park and Pascual Sisto. Although the two artists live in seemingly opposite corners of the globe, Seoul and Los Angeles, they share a modern awareness of pattern making.
Videos by June Bum Park both document his performance as the creator of each work and expose the mechanical aspects of routine activity. Framing a static point of view seen by the observer of a miniature world, Park displays abstract cyclical narratives.
In III Crossing, real world events on the street at an intersection appear to be manipulated by an enormous hand, as large fingers become the barrier between pedestrians and traffic with cars scooted along. Emphasizing its aerial perspective, this work is projected on the gallery floor. A similar illusion in scale is portrayed in The Occupation, which uses photo-collage as a vehicle to demonstrate continual commercial strip mall construction covering a generic green landscape. Emblems of global corporations and cars in parking lots are replaced, one after the other, marking a territory that is in constant flux. Puzzle 3 visualizes the samsara of institutional routine and the solving of problems. The video chirps with the noise of squeaky desks and sped up voices, as 16 seated individuals are re-ordered multiple times into five rows of pastel blue and yellow desks.
Visual cycles of urban and natural systems also appear in the video work of Pascual Sisto. Sisto digitally intervenes with otherwise mundane imagery as he crafts mesmerizing, impossible realities. Spatial compositions challenging the logic of everyday events—driving a car or witnessing the passage of birds overhead—are activated by the artist’s replication and patterning of form.
Sisto’s two-channel installation Push/Pull (my luck is your misfortune), rearranges seemingly endless lanes of evening traffic into opposing kaleidoscopic video planes. Approaching white lights from oncoming traffic pass in a tunnel-like flow, receding in the form of red taillights. The two squarely framed video spaces take on a cosmic scale, reflecting the physical logic of the Doppler effect, in which a red shift occurs in sources of light moving away from the observer. The viewers sit in a suspended state, neither coming nor going, but in a space between.
28 Years in the Implicate Order loops a single phase of activity based on the concepts of quantum mechanics. Set in an empty parking lot that forms a theoretical, late-night landscape, 28 basketballs vertically bounce at random. The spheres then align themselves in a wavelike, unified bounce to the ground, only to return again to chaos, as the cycle repeats itself. Also on view, 4 is Better explores the simple power of multiplicity in rhythmic and biomorphic forms. Sea gulls cloned into groups of four travel freely across clear skies, sans horizon line, to the sound of waves breaking at the seashore.
