Scenes for a Box Carnival

January 11, 2008 - February 23, 2008

Southern Exposure (SoEx) presents four concurrent solo exhibitions and public projects by four Bay Area based artists: Chris Bell, Elaine Buckholtz, Bruce Tomb, and Jenifer Wofford.

Elaine Buckholtz’s Scenes for a Box Carnival, is a video installation that takes an exterior approach to image projection. Utilizing four projectors during the evening hours to light the windows, trees and sidewalk directly outside the gallery, passersby become mesmerized by and marvel at the subtle, pulsating images lighting up the trees. Discovering Scenes for a Box Carnival outside the gallery is like happening upon a secret garden in the middle of the city.

**Scenes For a Box Carnival is an evening piece and can be viewed from Tuesday - Saturday, 6:00PM - 12:00AM.

....................................................................................

essay about Elaine Buckholtz
by Valerie Imus

The random discovery of a treasure on the city sidewalk sometimes is referred to as a “ground score.” There are times when urban streets are so full of peculiarly striking moments, surreal tableaux and surprising finds that they seem to be in mid-performance. Scoring an encounter with Elaine Buckholtz’s nighttime storefront installation Scenes for a Box Carnival at the end of a sidewalk-pounding day, one is reminded of the dramatic possibilities latent in the quotidian interactions between a neighborhood’s architecture and its inhabitants. From a block away its light is visible spilling over the sidewalk, bouncing through the trees and reflecting across cars cruising past. The work is a beacon that calls out to passersby and introduces Southern Exposure to its new neighborhood.

Buckholtz has installed video projectors propped askew and projecting onto the storefront walls and windows of Southern Exposure. The videos are four- to five-minute looped sections of footage that is, in Buckholtz’s words, “just shy of the familiar.” The effect is an abstract kaleidoscope of spinning, pulsating light that engulfs the entrance to the building and its surroundings. The building seems to be shuddering or swaying woozily from the force within. Box Carnival plays with the tensions between one’s experience of recognizable and abstracted forms and of sculpture and architecture. It immerses the viewer in its fluid forms and expansive scale, producing a sense of vertigo and foregrounding the installation’s oscillation between architectural intervention and cinematic display.

Buckholtz’s abstracted light patterns are honed and distilled, like precisely crafted oases within an image- and information-saturated world. Though Box Carnival doesn’t easily fall into the category of traditional film, it nods to both early structural film, which rebelled against the established parameters of the medium, and the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who advocated a new definition of cinema based on the manipulation of light in time.

As an undergraduate, Buckholtz decided not to study film because of the limits of cinematic space; she became fascinated by light and motion in other forms. For the last 20 years, she has worked as a renowned lighting designer for a wide variety of performers, including Contraband, Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk and Terry Riley, building a reputation as a specialist in moving light sources and innovative design for outdoor performances. Her subtly elegant video installations, which reconfigure the viewer’s apprehension of space, are a natural progression in her explorations of theatricality outside of the proscenium arch or cinematic frame.

Buckholtz’s hypnotic gallery installations and her exterior projections also play with the boundaries of performative time. In both environments, one seems to come upon her work in midstream and is absorbed into its temporal flow. The nearly recognizable pulsating imagery mesmerizes passersby, lures viewers in and reminds them of time’s elasticity.

The controlled, contained space of the gallery often constrains artwork within the context of its own monoculture, but the experience of Box Carnival shifts with each viewing. Inserted into the perpetually changing neighborhood, interrupting the flow of the pedestrian’s daily urban routine, the work subtly morphs with one’s reactions to activity in the vicinity. Box Carnival engages the tension between the city dweller’s almost unconscious need to watch his or her back and keep up certain peripheral feelers, and the impulse to allow oneself to be curious and slow down to a meditative pace. Walking through the city at night, one doesn’t expect to find oneself suddenly pausing to marvel with other passersby at the play of light on trees. Discovering Box Carnival on Fourteenth Street is like scoring a mysteriously peaceful garden in the middle of the city.