By Allison Oh
Tuesday night’s opening for the Biola Art Gallery’s show “MEDIaTATIONS” began with chilly winds and confusion. The glass door of the gallery, obscured by butcher paper, was closed: a departure from the typical wide-open welcome. Carrying slices of frozen cheesecake, visitors hovered in uncertainty by the main gallery entrance, debating whether to satisfy their curiosity or respect social convention and wait for a proper opening.
Inside, however, awaited a visual spectacle of light and sound.
“MEDIaTATIONS” is the first all-video art show ever hosted at Biola, courtesy of Nancy Buchanan, a professor at the California Arts Institute, commonly known as CalArts. Bringing together 15 CalArts students from both the art and the film school, Buchanan had them focus on nature as the common theme to explore using video, digital editing, or even sculpture using old televisions.
Admittedly, the show is rather compact and potentially overwhelming. After all, squeezing 15 different works in a two room gallery is bound to cause complications. However, if you follow the location guide and refer to the packet of artist statements, navigating the show becomes profoundly more manageable. In fact, reading the artists’ statements is probably the best way to enjoy these works, as the artists often provide explanation for the technique they used to create each work. This information helps unwrap the art, giving viewers a key into the mind and intention of the artist.
Video art is one of the most flexible art mediums as well as one of the newest. Born in the '60s, it grew with the advent of televisions in every household and has developed as video and communication technology progresses: television, the camcorder, digital recording and editing and the Internet.
“MEDIaTATIONS” shows off a wide variety of ways video art can be experienced, from the full-wall projection by Alex Lorge in the annex gallery to Sarah Manuwal’s piece displayed on ancient TVs, to the secret room where Natasha Mendonca’s video peeps down at viewers through a ceiling trap door.
Exploring nature through technology makes an interesting tension throughout the entire show as different artists either heighten the tension or try to find a unique way to resolve the gap between the natural and the artificial. James Raymond’s “Totem” focuses on the differences between nature and technology, drawing visitors’ attention to the inherent conflict present in our society’s tendency to prefer the artificial to the natural.
Using computer software and other digital mediums, he creates domestic and wild animals, as well as an artificial environment for them to live in. But the animals twitch spastically and their entire environment is perched on a meadow of Astroturf, leaving the viewer with an indelible sense that nature and technology will always oppose each other. It also creates a longing for “natural” nature, missing real animals and thinking of how they move and breathe, so unlike the dead-yet-moving behavior of the ones in “Totem.”
On the other hand, several pieces strive to bridge the gap between nature and technology by drawing analogies between the two. Steven Klems’ piece, a sculpture made of discarded e-waste and other broken tech, makes a comparison between the way we treat technology and how we’ve treated nature: an expendable resource to be used and dumped. Jacob Jones’ “Cosmoclump” points to ways in which technology mirrors nature, using a television monitor to create a strange and unseen world much like the one revealed when someone pulls a rock from the ground, exposing networks of insect tunnels and underground habitats.
Whether trying to find resolution or heightening the conflict, “MEDIaTATIONS” provides space to contemplate our relationship with the natural world, using our own technology to show what kind of effect we have on nature. But even deeper than that, the show is a meditation on the effect technology has on us — how we think of nature, how we relate to the outside world and our increasing dependence on technology and visual mediums to connect us to that world — whether through television documentaries or digital footage over the internet.
Does it frighten us that technology has become the primary means through which we now have knowledge of the world, or do we even give it a second thought? It is these questions that “MEDIaTATIONS” asks, bringing viewers inside a space where, surrounded by the noise and flash of technology, they long to be outside again.
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