Last Chance

Catch it or regret it

by Holly Otterbein

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Jul 27, 2010

Locks Gallery

In Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib’s video diptych White Sands, a soundtrack of bewitching strings and electronics performed by members of Espers and Bardo Pond — as well as audio clips sourced from a feral military control room — complements a rapid-fire array of black-and-white images of 1-foot-tall ants, blighted homes, abstract war paraphernalia, a glistening sun, a retching volcano, drifting sand dunes (or are those snow-capped mountains?) and one lone person in the desert armed with a metal detector. Phew. Oddly, despite this over-stimulation, the viewer’s senses never fry. In fact, watching White Sands is gently intoxicating, like going under with a doctor’s knowing hand in yours.

The fairly obvious subtext in the video are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Brilliantly, Hironaka and Suib filmed it at the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, the site of the first atomic-bomb explosion and still an active military grounds.)  The woman (or man, it’s hard to tell) traversing the sand dunes is an especially effective conceit: What is she doing with a metal detector? Is she trying to make sense of the desert with it, to hear its thoughts? Or perhaps the symbolism is more straightforward: A person doggedly looks for resources, for hours and hours, in a hostile terrain with an ineffective instrument.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Inside Locks Gallery, White Sands is situated opposite The Fall (pictured), a shorter, more mystical piece by Hironaka and Suib. The same soundtrack follows a white horse in the woods of northwestern Pennsylvania, as it rocks back and forth in ecstasy. Like White Sands, The Fall will politely put you in a trance, but it lacks the substance of the former video, so the daze can feel like a cheap high.

“Whiteout” is Hironaka and Suib’s first exhibit since the closure of Screening, their Chinatown-based video art gallery. Unlike some of us, they’re unsentimental about its demise.

“Screening was never intended to be a permanent or even long-term fixture,” say the husband-and-wife team over e-mail. “Did it expand access [to video art]? Well, we don’t have numbers to verify, but at the very least, we were able to facilitate the Philly debut of a number of very acclaimed artists in Philly — Takeshi Murata, Kelly Richardson, Lars Laumann, Michael Bell-Smith — and were the only space in Philly, other than the little black box at PMA [Philadelphia Museum of Art], where gallery-goers could count on seeing artworks on film and video every month.”

R.I.P., Screening, and may your memory live on in many more shows like “White­out.” Ends Aug. 11, Locks Gallery, 600 Washington Square S., 215-629-1000, locksgallery.com.

Repression, whether in the form of adolescence, controlling regimes or a simple prompt, can fuel the greatest art. In "Project 35," a series of videos selected by 35 international curators, this truism reasserts itself in three pieces by Zhou Xiaohu, the team of Tuán Andrew Nguyên and Phù Nam Thúc Hà, and Guy Ben-Ner, about legendary Chinese news broadcasts, Vietnam's inhibited urban life and a lonesome family man, respectively. Be sure to check out the latter, titled Berkeley's Island, if only for the penis puppets. Ends July 31, Levy Gallery at Moore College of Art & Design, 1916 Race St., 215-965-4027, thegalleriesatmoore.org.

Summer’s nice, but turning into a pool of sweat while trying to appreciate it, not so much. Let’s go enjoy nature by seeing the exhibit “Let’s Go Enjoy Nature!” indoors: The works in this Seraphin Gallery collection, especially Timothy Callaghan’s acrylic-and-oil paintings depicting infelicitous city scenes, are as unabashedly contradictory and tongue-in-cheek as the exhibit’s title. Ends Aug. 3, Seraphin Gallery, 1108 Pine St., 215-923-7000, seraphin.squarespace.com.

(holly.otterbein@citypaper.net)

Magic Number
Shakespeare in Clark Park
Kaleidoscope
Rick Moody/Larry Doyle