Wrack Focus
Wrack Focus
Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
December 6 - 14, 2018
Group exhibition of works by Liz Deschenes, Ellie Ga, Janis Kounellis, Do Ho Suh, R. H. Quaytman, and Cosima von Bonin, co-curated by Bergen Hendrickson, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and me.
Link to exhibition web page.
If the focus is shallow, the technique becomes more noticeable. In a single shot, images volley time.
The time it takes to read text against images about the Pharos lighthouse in Alexandria (Ellie Ga). The time it takes for two interlaced images—bound in a lenticular painting—to be revealed, though in a hardly stable manner (R.H. Quaytman). The time it takes to move from a “real” green screen, to its scan, to its surrogate, a photo—a stand-in for a stand-in (Liz Deschenes).
Image deployment is an action that has duration and is unstable. It is clear that the capacity for image deployment is bounded and exhaustible. (There are only 78 slides in each slide projector’s carousel).
Where is a viewer situated within this? What is a viewer to do with the time between iterations of image deployment? Draw the time out, make it longer. Hope for a lingering, a delight, a play within the finitude put forth by images.
The plush crab (Cosima von Bonin) begs for it, makes it materially apparent, and holds the viewer in a space of anticipation before the performance. The discrete images of the lenticular print possess a visual tolerance, a threshold under which the constructions intertwine (Quaytman). The green screen’s moire-like pattern index the friction and feedback of several permutations (Deschenes). The lacquer drawing, itself suspended between substrates, illustrates inquiry, wracking the brain (Do Ho Suh).
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Wrack Focus
As in a change of focus across depth and within a single shot, rack focus.
As in a cognitive searching, wrack the mind.
As in a thing ruined or destroyed, from shipwreck, wrack.
Wrack Focus is about submersion, bifurcation, and play-as-practice. With works by Liz Deschenes, Ellie Ga, Janis Kounellis, Do Ho Suh, R. H. Quaytman, and Cosima von Bonin, Wrack Focus proffers a staging in which viewers momentarily suspend an unresolved exchange between two operations: bifurcation, division into two, and stereoscopy, enhancing the illusion of depth.
These operations illuminate the individual works as well as the relationships between works, a condition that implores viewers to tune their focus within and between images. Racking focus requires that works shift in and out of states of obscurity and clarity while maintaining a contiguous proximity enough to occupy the same frame. Movements between obscurity, clarity, and proximity usher the unresolved dialectical between bifurcation and stereoscopy to surface, and this is precisely where the viewer enters the scene.
Image: installation view. Photo courtesy Chris Kendall.
