Photo by: Deidre Helton
Miniature TV screens on their backs exuding war sound recordings, a screen of mouths all talking unsynchronized and a tap dancer’s feet illustrated on the ceiling are just a few abstract artworks that can be found in Blink! Light, Sound and the Moving Picture, the new exhibit at the Denver Art Museum.
An entire gallery of Blink! displays text and lines projected upon the walls, ceiling and even guests to the gallery, creating a presentation that is both unusual and mesmerizing.
As words, letters and abstract objects jump around the room, the gallery takes on a very psychedelic manner, with guests laying on the floor starring up at the projections in meditation as thought they are looking at the stars.
Susie J. Lee’s “Consummation” is another piece of work gives the visual appearance that light is being bent in front of the viewer. Constructed of hand-carved wood with video projected onto it with sound, “Consummation” appears to bend the video and light of a single line that moves along the wood which juts out from the two-dimensional wall giving the light a three-dimensional quality.
Edward Lowe presents a piece titled “Self Portrait” that depicts himself in the form of an x-ray.
Shown with his large-framed glasses still on and his fingers crossed over his forehead, this giant x-ray shows the opposite illustration of photographs in a black-and-white depiction of this man’s facial bone structure.
A small room of the main exhibit is exclusively used to display Bjorn Melhus’ “Still Men Out There,” which consists of a six-channel video installation with sound coming from televisions laid on their backs in a dark room.
The TVs flash colors and depictions to the ceiling while producing war sounds of shooting, shouting and speaking about experiences of the war concurrently.
Another artwork consists of nine medium sized televisions connected to a triangluar-shaped wire board depicting a girl standing to one side.
The televisions flash a number of images on a reel as wires hang from the bottom of the board.
Many of the pieces displayed in Blink! contain bar-codes on the plaques which can be scanned by the bar-code scanning application available to most smart phones leading viewers to further information about the artists and their work.
Blink! ison display until May 1. For more information visit www.denverartmuseum.org.
Photos courtesy of Deidre Helton.
