When you walk into Reel to Reel at the Clemetine Gallery, you walk into a mystery. Clicking, whirring machines are everywhere and, at the center, a video screen that’s somehow pulls them all together. But how?
And the machines are designed to afford just that kind of investigation, leaving tiny cracks just wide enough for curious eyes to peek in and see miniature rooms and cameras. Or a whirling cylinder that produces a panoramic flyover or a moving sandbox that creates cloud cover or a room full of turntables that work in tandem to generate the soundtrack. Or the machine that makes eclipses (excerpt). Then the realization hits you: it’s a sort of video Rube Goldberg machine — an interleaved bunch of contraptions that works together to produce a cleverly enigmatic short film, each time a little different.
Model rooms, staircases, and landscapes inside boxes with tiny moving cameras:
A camera skims the surface of this cylinder to generate panoramic flyovers:
Turntables provide music on-cue:
It’s a fascinating show not as much for the final product film as for the component parts: the intricate, artfully constructed boxes, cameras, and wires, and the extra clever, impeccably timed transitions between their outputs. The show’s title, Reel to Reel, then, nicely captures the harmony and hand-off on display — once, that is, you’ve figured out the mystery.
Find more on Reel to Reel at Clementine Gallery and other work by Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher at Shofish.
Also hot in Chelsea: David Fred’s Far From Equilibrium sound-driven kinetic sculptures, Dan Rozin’s interactive wooden mirrors in Fabrication, the group show She & I looking at socio-political change in China (particularly love Bang!), and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s lovely The Ground, The Root, and The Air, a short film shot in Laos that artfully captures the cultural significance of the Bodhi Tree.
Subscribe
0 Responses to “Clementine’s Eclipse Machine”