Fictional
Cities
Marie
Sester, L'Architecture du Paradis
Alain Bublex, Glooscap
12-6 pm Wednesday-Sunday. $3, PICA members free.Ends April
23.
Portland Institute
for Contemporary Art
219 NW 12th Ave., #100.
Check out Alain
Bublex's Ryder Truck Project at www.pica.org.
The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's first exhibition
since moving to the Pearl District reminds me of looking
out of an airplane during takeoff. From thousands of feet
up, the view is both grandiose and humbling. The electrically
lit urban grids contrasting with the placid, rural acres
of green feed my imagination. Marie Sester and Alain Bublex
attempt to highlight these distinctions in Fictional
Cities.
Both French artists present work that examines the relationship
between the tangible and the intangible elements that define
a place--an appropriate inaugural selection for PICA right
now.
Glooscap by Alain Bublex is a display of photographs,
maps, paintings and town records that document a fictional
city, the eponymous Glooscap. Bublex's
presentation simulates a historical center, an environment
that transforms the art-viewer into tourist. Well, OK.
Creating physical objects to substantiate a fictional city
is an interesting concept, anyway. It brings into
question our perceptions and understandings of a particular
place and how accurately these ideas are recorded. Bublex's
translation of an intriguing notion into an art installation,
however, is like revisiting every grade-school field trip
you ever made to a tourist site in Oregon. The excitement
and anticipation of Bublex's fiction dissipates in the sterile
maps, innocuous photographs and dry anecdotes.
Bublex presents an additional installation entitled Ryder
Truck. This piece is another good idea that falters
in the journey from idea to manifestation. He and three
assistants were commissioned to drive three shiny yellow
Ryder Trucks from Allentown, Pa., to Portland, more or less
following the original route of the Oregon Trail. Bublex
recorded the journey with digital still and video cameras,
as well as a written journal. The resulting display includes
multiple monitors showing hours (presumably) of the same
miserably tedious road footage. Lining the perimeter of
the room are photographs and maps relating to their journey,
displayed uniformly beneath Plexiglas, atop hip, rubber-surfaced
tables. Unfortunately, there are no entries from the journal,
which is available only on PICA's Web site. The atmosphere
of this installation is at best clean. There is a definitive
lack of intimacy or humor relating to the charged events
of migration, change and travel. The viewer waits for the
human element of Ryder Truck to surface but is left
with large glossy photographs showcasing Ryder's corporate
logo.
The flip side to all this is Marie Sester's L'Architecture
du Paradis, the gem within Fictional Cities. Sester
orchestrates an electronic representation describing five
cities: Babylon, Jerusalem, Atlantis, New York and Paradise.
A technically savvy piece, L'Architecture moves with
poetic rhythm. The lighting, sound and imagery activate
the space, encircling the viewer.
Sester projects images of architectural diagrams, maps
and X-ray scans, utilizing slow fades and computer-animated
morphings. The multilayered score includes a recitation
of Plato's Timaeus (a reference to the vanished utopia
of Atlantis) and soprano and alto voices repeating a musical
phrase. As the projections and lighting move about the space,
the viewer is seduced by Sester's intellectual meditations
on past and present archetypes of human organization.
I was a little suspicious of the score. The singing is
too emotionally leading, and the recited Timaeus
is unnecessarily highbrow. This criticism aside, the visual
fluidity of the piece is awe-inspiring. It aggressively
evokes a sense of wonder and achieves its intellectual aims.
L'Architecture du Paradis, which runs through April
23, is unlike anything else in Portland and is worth seeing
at least once.
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 8,
2000
|
