Not many art shows make you involuntarily brace for scary surprises. Don’t worry, that won’t happen here (you can let go of my hand now), but there’s something about the mojo in the air at
Blur of the Otherworldly that sets the brain racing. Maybe it’s the accumulated shrieks, clanks, and moans that emanate from the audio and video works stationed around the gallery. Or maybe it’s the show’s stated purpose, to “explore culturally inbred questions/superstitions concerning parallel worlds to our own.” Or maybe it’s just that it’s disconcerting being yelled at by a plant for the first time.
Nearby rests Miya Masaoka’s “Pieces for Plants,” consisting of a philodendron connected to a laptop via electrodes stuck to its leaves. Through some nearby speakers, it’s screeching a theremin-like aria that varies according to how viewer and plant interact. Simultaneously ridiculous and profound, “Plants” fits right into Blur’s eclectic display space, where video projections, electronic sculptures, creepy photos, and internet experiments into the otherworldly vie for our serious inquiry. (And then there’s Spencer Finch’s “My Own Personal SETI,” consisting of a Salvation Army armchair—the “settee”—some plastic tubing, duct tape, and a seven-foot-tall tinfoil listening trumpet. Let us know how that works out, right after we finish laughing.)
ýossibly the earliest—and weirdest—works in the show are Ted Serios’ “Thoughtographs.” Serios, an alcoholic bellhop from Chicago, claimed the ability to project mental images onto undeveloped film. The black-and-white Polaroids (made in the mid-1960s in partnership with psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud) depict a scowling, drunk Serios standing in a crummy little room, glowering and gesticulating at the camera while hazy images of faces, church steeples, and otherwise unexplainable double exposures float around him. Whether the images are authentically psychic is up for debate, but there’s no doubt about the darkly poetic and claustrophobic miasma they conjure. On the opposite side of the emotional spectrum are Chrysanne Stathacos’ “The Aura Project/Invisible Colors” Polaroids, cheery Kirlian portraits of serene men, women, and children (plus one dog) surrounded by the protective nimbus of their luminous, cotton-candy auras. Each burst of electromagnetic spectrum is precious in its uniqueness and quite beautiful.
The show’s most successful work is Jennifer and Kevin McCoy’s “Horror Chase,” a video re-creation of the final chase sequence from Evil Dead 2 that follows a passable “Bruce Campbell” as he stumbles from room to room, fleeing in terror from a pursuant unseen, but assumedly the viewer sitting in the audience. Suddenly the video reverses—software randomly directs not only the direction but the speed of the digitized loop—and we realize the actor’s been adopting positions that could either be, depending on the direction of the playback, those of the hunter or the quarry. A swipe with the hand to “get away” becomes a frightening grab at a quarry. The tables are turned until the video reverses again, trapping you in an endless ballet of eat-or-be-eaten.
While the varied and ingenious works that co-curators Mark Alice Durant and Jane Marsching have assembled make an attractive, and never too digressive, smorgasbord of riffs on a theme, there’s very little context for some conceptual-heavy or overly esoteric pieces that could use the backup of a good stiff explanation. Susan Collins’ “The Spectrascope” looks like a damaged JPEG but is, apparently—this gleaned from the artist’s statement—a live video feed from an allegedly haunted manor house in England, its pixels updated in absurdist, time-lapse detail. “What we are left with is an evanescent compiled image of time,” Collins claims. Not really, but thanks for playing.
However, Zoë Beloff’s “The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva. C” is a pleasant exception to this impulse toward secrecy. Even before entering the darkened chamber where the multiscreen video is installed (don’t skip the 3-D glasses before going in) there are pages posted from the book—a firsthand account of a French medium who could manifest “ectoplasm” under hypnosis—that inspired the work, leaving less time to play stump-the-viewer and more time to enjoy Beloff’s clever and well-executed installation.
Maybe this impulse to keep audiences in the dark ties in to the spiritualist’s reluctance to give up all her secrets, or the fear that paranormal phenomena’s delightful mystery shrivels under too much scrutiny. But the quality of work in this show is so high there’s no reason for such shyness. For Blur, the Ouija points to yes.
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