Because he and his girlfriend just broke up and he remains broken up about it, a guard at the Frye cannot force himself to rotate through the gallery in which Cindy Loehr‘s two-channel video, Colloquy, runs on two monitors.
The Frye has a tight crew. Other guards are covering for him.
He’s not the only one who backs away as if the gallery’s a gun. Loehr’s pair of talking hands with rhinestone eyes and mouths that move in the crack between thumb and palm recite a text that anybody who’s not extraordinarily lucky has already heard and/or spoken.
Only one hand talks, and it’s a massive utterance.
In their search for closure, the garrulous cover their targets in wounded projections. They lay out what the other did wrong and how (even now) the rift can be healed (baby, don’t go), if only the silent would speak in confessional detail and profess revived devotion.
Loehr’s silent, soon-to-be ex expresses misery with small, downcast quivers. No frog spreadeagled in a high school biology lab suffers more. The text tells itself through hands manipulated into expression, which makes those hands puppets. The videos that feature them are in The Puppet Show, a traveling exhibit from the ICA.
At the Frye through Sept. 13. Previous here, more to come.
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