Multiverse: Idiosyncratic Theorizing
The Claremont Museum of Art’s new Multiverse has some imagination
Fred Tomaselli’s Untitled, a series of four photograms (a photographic print made without film, using photo emulsion paper exposed directly to light, with, in this case, objects set on top to mask out exposure) with photocollege and gouache, bids us to look into the center of a galaxy populated by glowing orbs of light and sentient, thinking eyes, piscine and human. Tomaselli’s photograms invert the order of observation in creating celestial bodies that look back at you. The center of Tomaselli’s Large Blue Geode executed in his signature style of photocollage, paint, and resin, explodes with a photocollege of crystalline shapes.
Animated from still photos of our own sun, Diana Thater’s DVD on DVD monitors, Blue Green Yellow Suns, conveys the austere beauty of our solar entity. An absorbing, quiet video, Blue Green Yellow Suns provides ample resolution to see sun spots and the dynamic and eerie Coronal loops which surge beyond the surface of the sun along shifting magnetic fields. Thater’s adjacent work, Oculus, a projection reflected off a hand mirror, is barely perceptible on the wall and requires a darker room to work any magic.
Emilie Halpern’s mixed media installation, June 29, 2055, employs blackout cloth and various size pinholes to create a twinkling night sky replete with constellations. The title refers to the year Halpern cites, in an online interview with artist and writer Catherine Wagley, as, “the estimated year” of her death, suggesting a seer-like quality to her vision, and contextualizing her lifespan in a cosmic time frame. This is a meditative work that requires time, physically, to absorb.
In Jedediah Caesar’s Untitled (Speakerbox), a layer cake of chipboard, wood scraps, cast and carved plaster, coffee stirrers, corrugated cardboard, resin, paint, and pigment, surface color has the appearance of wax, creamy in places, translucent in others. Like a model of planetary accretion, these small scale plinths are the gravitational blocks of Caesar’s studio.
Meanwhile, Violet Hopkins’ pair of drawings in colored pencils and inks reveals the interior of a cave and alternately a volcanic eruption. Das Heiliqtum von Petra, an approximately five-and-a-half foot square drawing of a cave’s interior, communicates intimacy and familiarity. The cave, lit from within by a luminescent glowing, exhibits voluptuous pink cavern walls, stalagmites and stalactites. Velvety black ink takes over at the edges of the drawing. Right By My Side, about two inches square, executed in pencil on paper mounted on aluminum, reveals the fractal chaos of a volcanic eruption, the scale of the work presupposes distance and creates the impression of an observer to foreign phenomena.
Panoptikon is an animated film made from highly detailed drawings by Emre Hüner. Full of biomorphic experimentation and the decaying hulks of ships and dinosaur bones, the film is quirky, and it is accompanied by a lush musical score. Panoptikon ends far too soon, and this work—really the only piece in Multiverse that creates a self contained world—feels like it should go on forever. The ambiguity of Hüner’s symbolism does not detract from the work, but the world the artist has created feels so dense that more time is required to explore it.
Where Multiverse engages best is in the works that lead us to fictions and visions; the show has more in common with the work of Borges than with esoteric theories of everything. Although Multiverse promises more than it delivers—it is, after all, a mere flirtation with untested hypotheses—it delivers work which leads to worlds of the imagination.
Multiverse at the Claremont Museum of Art, 536 West First Street, Claremont, (909) 621-3200. Through December 28, 2008.
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