"Pencil on Glass" at Voz Alta Project Gallery
Richard Frankin
San Diego’s 25-year old Community Art Space Project, dubbed "Sushi," is a nomadic but essential voice in the San Diego art community. Sushi recently linked with the Voz Alta Project–self-described via its website as a "Chicana/o nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting community empowerment and social change through cross-cultural and multidisciplinary art forms"–for an East-coast-West-coast, multi-discipline and multi-ethnic exhibition come cross-pollination. There were other cross-pollinations at work as well–artists translated movements into sound, transmogrify air into substance, turn fame into inconsequence.
The late model radios, televisions, speakers and transmitters stationed around the gallery make you think you’ve happened into a retro-electronics exhibit. Strategically positioned by Joe Winter, a San Diego-based artist, these radio devices transmit music, televisions project gentle snowy screens. As people mill about the space, tunes are distorted, snowy scenes jerk, nervous vertical lines play across the screens, hisses and feedback whistles loop through the air. Winter has translated our movements through space into a perceptible language of energy emissions; he has created an interference music video. But who is interfering with which frequencies–human or machine? And who is transmitting? Luigi Russolo would be proud.
Shannon Spanhake, also from San Diego, works with data visualizations, asking us to observe the live components of the air through which we pass. Her "microbial landscape portrait" was mounted on the exterior window of the gallery allowing the transmogrified air from within the gallery to occlude one’s vision from outside. Spanhake used four large, clear acrylic rectangular boxes as petri dishes which she set in the four corners of the gallery space. After an hour of exposure and a week of incubation, the dishes were sealed and mounted. The golden-colored agar mixed with the pale whites, yellows, small orange dots, streaks, stars and flowers of the microorganic colonies. You could still peer, with difficulty, into the gallery’s interior, your view obscured by the gallery’s air in concentrated and nourished form.
Mark Stockton, cross-country from his native Brooklyn, provided six tiny (roughly two inch by one inch) pencil sketches of famous faces. Our familiarity with these portraits was based on their notoriety as either famous people who were caught doing incriminating things (OJ, Marv Albert and Nick Nolte) or criminals who became famous because on their acts of infamy (James Earl Ray, Timothy McVeigh and David Koresh). Sketched by either mechanical pencil or a plain old No.2, Mark’s images were separately mounted in 11 by 14 inch frames, centered and lost in a sea of white. Stockton relegated his subjects to their proportionate importance–to view the faces, you were forced to inspect them closely (finding wrinkles and emotions sketched delicately and precisely into each miniature); once you stepped back from the portraits, the small rectangles became a space of ‘gray-inconsequence’ against a larger background of white matting.
