the culture fields / blog

“…the crystal is never pure and perfect; it has a failing, a point of flight, a ‘flaw’. It is always cracked. And this is what depth of field reveals; there is not simply a rolling up of a round in the crystal; something is going to slip away in the background, in depth, through the third side or third dimension, through the crack…Everything is mirror-images, distributed in depth.”
-Gilles Deleuze, The Time Image

Denise Burge and Lisa Siders began working collaboratively in 2006 after Burge was awarded a grant from the University of Cincinnati to produce a series of short music videos, collaborating on each video with a female friend. “Driveway”, the video created by Burge and Siders, was constructed using a series of still frames set to music composed by the artists. The process of constructing quilts, a background shared by both artists, visually influenced the resulting video and inspired the artists to continue collaborating.

The work presented in On the Point of Crystal Time is part of a larger project created over the past year by Burge and Siders titled Maidens of the Cosmic Body Running. The maiden is one of many reoccurring characters throughout the work, characters that are (or attempting to reach) a sort of primal and blissful state of being that evokes a sense of drama and mythology. The dark shrouded character, seen in the photo collage and video monitor installation is another character, as is the woman dressed in puritan-style costume. The forest is the fourth character, represented both visually (through imagery) and literally under the salt-covered table in the center of the gallery.

The exhibition can be read as an exploration of extremes, whether in materials (soft stretches of fabric hung on the wall juxtaposed with technical videos), sensory stimuli (a woman in antebellum costume set against a loop of Donna Summer’s song “I Feel Love”) or visual themes (the dark wall collage running down the outside wall contrasted with the soft white lighted line in the hallway). These mirroring of extremes and remixing of imagery, characters and ideas, continue through each element in the exhibition. They are sometimes represented literally and other times implied symbolically.

In the photo collage (Black Line / White Line II), the layered stories of the reoccurring characters are presented as an installation, constructed from printed video stills, lace doilies, yarn, photos and drawings. Dark and light maidens are interwoven with images of disco balls and video stills, surrounded by black yarn, stretched to create mirrored compositions. The visual webs and lace patterns reference the repetition and shapes often found in nature such as crystals, diamonds and rock salt.

The hallway running down the center of the gallery begins with a projected video (The Hill – I Feel Love Remix) of a woman in a costume made by the artists; the woman dances and spins with a web-like shawl. The forest observes from behind the woman as she flows into and out of herself, an effect created by digitally cutting the video in half and mirroring it. The character is attempting to twirl towards a heightened state of being, with the help of the forest, Donna Summer and comfortable shoes.

The mirror below the video is covered in salt and two female figures, also cast in salt. The figures reference the sleeping maiden, also found in the photo collage, the animated drawing and the video screen display. The gently glowing white line (Black Line / White Line I) stretches down the hallway, covered in a variety of contrasting elements such as rock salt and thrift store shoes, glitter covered bones and porcelain statues, buttons and honeycombs. On the walls hang different versions (or remixes) of text that could be read as a mantra, which are chanted repetitively to achieve different states of mind:

I TWIST AND I TURN IN THIS FEELING OF NATURE
MY PORTION OF HOPE IS THIS FEELING OF NATURE
MY JOY AND MY FEAR IS THIS FEELING OF NATURE
I RADIATE GLOOM IN THIS FEELING OF NATURE
I’M SPROUTING AND SHITTING THIS FEELING OF NATURE
I’M LOST IN THE ECSTATIC FEELING OF NATURE
I’M VIVID AND VEILED IN THIS FEELING OF NATURE

The reflective version, on the right side of the hallway, was machine-cut from mirrored acrylic. On the opposite wall, a stenciled version was painted directly on the wall, made from wet Indian black salt. Further down the hall are two more remixes; on the left, another stencil made from wet charcoal. The last version (on the right) was also machine-made, cut from felt that was then soaked in saturated salt water. As the water evaporated, the crystals adhered to the felt.

At the end of the hallway another video (The Hill) is projected onto the salt-covered floor. In this version of the video, the same character, still in comfortable shoes, is mirrored as in the previous video. She grasps a mirror as she moves slowly in an out of the center creating web-like patterns. The soundtrack to this video, slow purposeful noises of the forest combined with deep guttural voices, attempts to find a primal place or sense of being using the same elements, but remixed once again.

The final projection in the rear corner of the gallery (Maiden in the Forest in the Maiden) and the seven monitor video display (Circuit), combine drawing, video, animation and at times, “live editing”, to further explore the duality of subjects (the forest) and media (specifically technology-based media). The forest character is central to both of these pieces, filtered through an obvious technological lens. In Circuit, the editing process is extremely self-aware; one can occasionally see where the artists filmed the computer screen as they were editing and remixing the images.

The video work at the front of the gallery (The Hill – Lace Remix) presents yet another reinterpretation of imagery and sound. A piano version of I Feel Love plays bucolically over a black and white video. The video was composed by layering elements from the other videos, visually and metaphorically alluding to the ideas of a web or lace. Adjacent to the video is the word “Fantasy” strung directly onto the wall in black yarn (Double Fantasy). The word is mirrored to create the illusion of a pattern or web. Here the artists use this specific word to symbolize how they place themselves in the videos as they create the characters and environments.

The collaborative work of Denise Burge and Lisa Siders delve into what Deleuze defines as the third dimension, sliding joyfully into the crack between the first and second dimensions. According to Deleuze’s theory about film and video, the first dimension is the present and the second is what you remember based on your experience. The third dimension is the crack in between, the uncertainty that creates a sense of depth. The characters in the videos wholly exist in these first two dimensions. However, by exploring the duality of the characters and themes through the literal and interpretive mirror, Burge and Siders’ videos find placement in the depth of the third dimension.

(Denise Burge and Lisa Siders: On the Point of Crystal Time is up at the DeVos Art Museum through September 28).