 The photo at the top is a detail from Dearraindrop's installation at John Connelly Presents, 526 W. 26th Street, NYC. The full-color psychedelia never lets up--the walls are covered floor to ceiling with crude, slightly brain damaged painting, collaging, knickknacks, and inflatables--but I prefer the dense sticker/product collage such as the area depicted here to the painting, which is mostly sub-high school in execution. Ironically, the most sophisticated work is the video by the youngest member, Billy Grant, who did just graduate from high school. Maybe video is a better medium than painting for this kind of A.D.D., media-overloaded consciousness? I recognized some of the footage from Psych-Out 2K3: scenes of Ronald McDonald leading a pair of ecstatic youngsters through a solarized psilocybin world. Two floors down in the same building, at Greene Naftali, Jim Drain & Ara Peterson present a more minimal, scientific version of the psych experience: the video kaleidoscope shown in a cropped view below. The viewer looks through a triangular window into a mirrored tunnel, the cross reflections of which create an astounding illusion of a large, hovering geodesic sphere, covered with ever-changing patterns. This is completely cool.
Billy Grant has also probably made the most insane music video ever, for Lightning Bolt's "13 Monsters", found on the band's recent DVD "The Power of Salad". This is a completely epilepsy-inducing color freakout of Slim Whitman Heads drifting across the TV screen, while Tony the Tiger plays guitar and a million other reminders of hyperactive sugar-cereal-dominated childhood rip into your cornea to the bombed-out sounds of Lightning Bolt. It's SO amazing, worth the purchase price of the DVD alone even if you're not a fan of the band (I am).
Thanks--I'll order it (it's available from Load Records). The tape from the John Connelly show is also being offered for sale by the gallery for pretty cheap ($10); they said they'll email me when copies become available.
Roberta Smith's description in the NY Times today nails the economy of the Drain/Peterson piece: "Prismatic color reigns in [...] an amazing kaleidoscopic DVD [...] by Jim Drain and Ara Peterson [...], who, with a small triangular screen and three mirrors, have concocted an endless geodesic structure that pulses through a veritable history of abstract pattern." She calls it "digital stained glass," which sounds a bit craftsy, and an "environment," which it's not because you can't walk into it--it's only an illusion of open space. Also, "small triangular screen" is shorthand: it's a regular, rectangular TV screen. The open end of the mirrored prism/tunnel masks the screen down to a triangle shape, which is then extrapolated into a sphere by all the reflections.
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The photo at the top is a detail from Dearraindrop's installation at John Connelly Presents, 526 W. 26th Street, NYC. The full-color psychedelia never lets up--the walls are covered floor to ceiling with crude, slightly brain damaged painting, collaging, knickknacks, and inflatables--but I prefer the dense sticker/product collage such as the area depicted here to the painting, which is mostly sub-high school in execution. Ironically, the most sophisticated work is the video by the youngest member, Billy Grant, who did just graduate from high school. Maybe video is a better medium than painting for this kind of A.D.D., media-overloaded consciousness? I recognized some of the footage from Psych-Out 2K3: scenes of Ronald McDonald leading a pair of ecstatic youngsters through a solarized psilocybin world. Two floors down in the same building, at Greene Naftali, Jim Drain & Ara Peterson present a more minimal, scientific version of the psych experience: the video kaleidoscope shown in a cropped view below. The viewer looks through a triangular window into a mirrored tunnel, the cross reflections of which create an astounding illusion of a large, hovering geodesic sphere, covered with ever-changing patterns. This is completely cool.
- tom moody 6-20-2003 5:32 am
Billy Grant has also probably made the most insane music video ever, for Lightning Bolt's "13 Monsters", found on the band's recent DVD "The Power of Salad". This is a completely epilepsy-inducing color freakout of Slim Whitman Heads drifting across the TV screen, while Tony the Tiger plays guitar and a million other reminders of hyperactive sugar-cereal-dominated childhood rip into your cornea to the bombed-out sounds of Lightning Bolt. It's SO amazing, worth the purchase price of the DVD alone even if you're not a fan of the band (I am).
- Brian Turner (bt@wfmu.org) (guest) 6-23-2003 6:05 am
Thanks--I'll order it (it's available from Load Records). The tape from the John Connelly show is also being offered for sale by the gallery for pretty cheap ($10); they said they'll email me when copies become available.
- tom moody 6-25-2003 12:11 am
Roberta Smith's description in the NY Times today nails the economy of the Drain/Peterson piece: "Prismatic color reigns in [...] an amazing kaleidoscopic DVD [...] by Jim Drain and Ara Peterson [...], who, with a small triangular screen and three mirrors, have concocted an endless geodesic structure that pulses through a veritable history of abstract pattern." She calls it "digital stained glass," which sounds a bit craftsy, and an "environment," which it's not because you can't walk into it--it's only an illusion of open space. Also, "small triangular screen" is shorthand: it's a regular, rectangular TV screen. The open end of the mirrored prism/tunnel masks the screen down to a triangle shape, which is then extrapolated into a sphere by all the reflections.
- tom moody 7-18-2003 9:57 am