In the distant past, the wide sweep of desert and dark sky enfolded travelers in what is now part of Western New Mexico. Little has changed in that small corner of the world, except the 400 stainless steel poles inserted into the ground in a mile-wide grid: Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field.
Indoors at Lawrimore Project, Tivon Rice‘s installation, A Macrocosmic Zero, offers a claustrophobic version of De Maria’s exhilarating vista. Instead of poles sunk into the ground, there are tubes hanging from the ceiling in a circular maze. Inside it, viewers see themselves in some kind of motion drag, being processed into the blurred center of the experience and heading toward oblivion.
There’s still awe, but it’s heavily laced with apprehension – the implication of a disaster covered by a televised feed, with a motorized panning tripod stabilizing robotic feedback. Nobody comes to the experience fresh or leaves unsullied. Rice agrees with what Francis Bacon said about the mediated image:
I think one’s sense of appearance is assaulted all the time by photography and by film. So that, when one looks at something, one’s not only looking at it directly but one’s also looking at it through the assault that has already been made on one by photography and film.
A series of videos in a portrait gallery offer a series of faces that lose their grip on their molecule structure.
One screen located outside the gallery features the artist. Rice
permanently burned his own image into the screen, where it hovers,
ghostlike, after the video is turned off.
Through March 27.
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