almost something insider forum

THROUGH ALMOST SOMETHING

The work here in Almost Something will seep in to your consciousness before it physically jumps out at you. Already, you have a feeling it is here. The works that surround you are visually enigmatic, disguised, camouflaged, conceptual, or invisible. By writing this, I hope to fill the room with questions instead ? questions that the works ask of you, questions that the works ask of themselves, and questions that you will ask of the work. What are you? What do you mean to tell me? How can I see you? These are some of the oldest, most fundamental questions we can ask in this world ? questions we find ourselves asking when we are most alone but begin to feel a certain presence, when we are visited by the idea that something is with us that is waiting to be seen. Like this, the work in Almost Something concerns itself with just how exactly to reveal itself to you. It wants you to react, to see it, but begs of you to seek it out eagerly and to look around closely. You must consider whether the quality of being ?almost something? shelters the work within a cloak of ambiguity or rightly conveys an ability to be provocative and skillfully unfamiliar. Is there something that almost something inherently resists becoming?

Daisuke Yamashiro’s work involves seeking out unexpected methods of communication. Yawn and see if anyone around you will yawn, for instance. Will someone nearby unconsciously reply? This piece tries to raise your sense of awareness without directing your attention to any particular object. Your participation in the work is more essential than your acknowledgment of it. Jayeon Kwon’s Sleeping Dolls are made with a similar underlying investment in the idea of being alert. The photographs depict staged compositions, but it is the artist’s daughters and not the artist who has composed them. The sleeping dolls are messages, essentially, that the two girls leave behind for their mother to discover and to interpret.

Look at Karin Campbell’s video projection. What do you see immediately and what do you see eventually? What’s closer, your mind or your eye? And which do you chose to trust? Which lends itself to your whim? The shadows you see ask for your interpretation. The shadows of the birds become bigger and more human. The shadows allow you this necessary step of remove to see through to your imagination. But what happens if you find yourself abandoned by a piece of work? Find the words “Touch Me” written in Braille with nails on the wall. What is more isolating than sensory deprivation or more paralyzing than harbored desires? Can irony really appeal to your senses? Consider Eric Baudart’s video, Pump. How different is the effect of a surprising observation vs. the presentation of a sequestered idea?

Almost Something wants you to visit these places – this terrain of near hits and misses that all of these works provoke. What is it to reckon with a piece of art that doesn’t assert what it aims to say in either physical or visual terms? What realm do your mind and your eye run off to in order to rekindle the spark of meaning? Is it really plausible that looking deeper will ease the strain on our collective psychic powers? Alas, as long as looking, seeing, and thinking remain as our available tools for understanding so will imagining, abstracting, and inventing be our means of providing a quality of newness to the world around us.

Rather than try to untangle the realm of the imaginary from that of the real, Amy Hsieh’s piece, Electro-reception, builds off of these mental glitches that instigate dreams and intuitions. She says “laundry drying racks remind me of electric transmission towers” and sets out to construct that very notion. The sculpture asserts her belief in gut feelings and everyday objects alike and exhibits a commitment to not suppressing or censoring her unusual brand of logic. Amy Hsieh believes that her work illustrates the ancient principal of the Tabula Smaragdina: What is above is like what is below – a concept that opens up numerous possibilities for metaphysical symmetries.

Occasionally, however, our wild imaginations rope in the real world too. We are taken over not just by subtle, half-conscious dreamy sensations, but by actual visual phenomena witnessed in a fully waking state. Yuji Oshima attributes a “strange feeling of the presence of supernatural phenomena” from the 25th floor of a building in Sao Paolo as the mysterious precursor to this video collage made from found footage material of UFOs. How often is seeing an act of will? How do the questions we ask determine what we will see? What does art want from the supernatural?

I’ll take up now the question of the conjurer. Does the conjurer see or know or neither? Does the conjurer take something you know and change it into something you WANT to believe in, devolving it in a way? How much invention goes along with belief? How much playing-along? Will ideas strike us like lightning or must we always be searching and seeking them out? Frank O’Toole’s Physiognomization demonstrates the mind’s ability to see unexpectedly and its willingness to play the part of the conjurer. It asks to what end do we seek out likenesses? Do images attest to the persistence of the mind to keep thinking, to know more, to stay alive? Nietzsche asks a similar question as he walks through the logic of dreams in Human, All Too Human, “How is it that the mind of the dreamer always errs so greatly, while the same mind awake tends to be so sober, careful, and skeptical about hypotheses?” Nietzsche then decides: Dream-thought is so easy for us now because, during mankind’s immense periods of development, we have been so well drilled in just this form of fantastic and cheap explanation from the first, best idea.

Next, consider the almost blank wall. Kerry Downey’s wall painting assumes a nearly devotional stance as well. The piece aims to pay homage to the act itself of erasing – to all whitewashed walls everywhere. How are surfaces built to begin with? How does the act of erasing relate to the act of hiding? How does hiding become evolving into something different altogether? The piece is emblematic of one of the questions hovering over the show …what is it I am (not) seeing? Can you make out the under-painting if you try? Can your eyes excavate any of what was painted before? What breaks the surface, what is being held back, what is being averted here? How much of painting is about being able to start over and to imagine again from the beginning?

Let’s continue by identifying some of the work most riddled by the possibility of not being seen. Find There, that is the power and Fluorescent Lights. Reuben Lorch-Miller’s fluorescent light fixture replicas appear as the everyday objects that they are meant to represent. Through the extent of mimicry employed in their making, however, they heighten your sense of what we actually stop noticing about things when we take them for being ordinary. The soundtrack to this piece, the continuous hum of the artist imitating the hum of a fluorescent light, is more likely to catch your attention than the fixtures themselves.

Start at the Observation Post by Robert McCarren. It seems appropriate to begin here, to begin by considering this work that is big and visible, yet it aims to take on a subsiding presence. The work seems to say, “Don’t look at me, look out from me.” The Lookout wants to direct your attention not toward itself but toward what it stands above and what surrounds it. Does is denote itself sculpturally, is there an apparent eye behind how it stands or does it assume practicality and sound building conventions as an aspect of its martyrdom? Take note of what you do or don’t see from here. What kind of perspective does the Lookout offer? From here we can look out on all that we have yet to ask ourselves or to see.