Downtown Arts Scene
HOLLYWOOD WITH CULTURE
by Nina Welch
icture this. Like on the backlots at a Hollywood studio, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) hosts an entertaining summer art exhibit at their downtown gallery in the Tucson Arts District. Lights, Camera, Action fills the frame in the charming warehouse district gallery on Toole Avenue. With monsoon season upon us, Lights has already illuminated the gallery, Camera is on it’s way with a big flash and Action is on Camera’s heels with plenty of crackling surprises. This three-part exhibition opened June 7 with Lights, a meditation on the theme of light, bringing together artists from all over the country working in a variety of media. The second part of the exhibition, Camera, zooms in on July 5 with artists using the camera to investigate identity and how one exposes their public persona. Anne-Marie Russell, MOCA’s Executive Director, is animated with excitement as she conducts a tour of this wide-angled artspace while ambient train sounds shake the floorboards. We finish at the MOCA shop with its inexpensive and unique gifts from current and past exhibits. Abundant in the cozy space are hoola hoops, neon-colored fly swatters, mammoth-sized rainbow pinwheels and artists’ wisdoms written on skinny pieces of paper like in a fortune cookie and coiled tightly in film tubes and to think such wisdom can be bought for just a buck. Separate from Lights, Camera, Action but very much apart of MOCA, Luke Stettner’s theme of modernization fall-out in his avant-garde photography exhibit is an added bonus.
Dissolve to extreme close-up on Russell’s enthusiasm as she talks about MOCA’s new Soon/Pronto series devoted to exhibiting the work of emerging artists. The images of Luke Stettner’s Junkspace series isolate moments in our built environment that perfectly articulate what visionary architect and playfully subversive thinker Rem Koolhaas calls “junkspace.” Rigorously formal and exquisitely beautiful, Stettner’s photographs of obscure places in Tucson paradoxically possess an undercurrent of tension and anxiety. When asked about Stettner’s current film project, Myron, Russell calls the artist on the gallery phone and quickly conducts a casual interview. “How are you finding the experience? What was it about the story that grabbed you personally as an artist?” The result of Stettner’s off-screen cameo appearance is revealed as Russell relates the conversation. According to Russell, this emerging artist/filmmaker is using the main character as an example of the human condition. Isolation, sadness and mystery is the theme and the color purple is also a character in the film like red is in Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Fade to black.
Cut to Lights flooding with its myriad of interactive and reflective works of art. The exhibit is an adventure of interaction and illumination. If you hunch down low and position your head just right Colin Wilkinson’s large, transparent cube (Cloaking Device) disappears! Then you can finger surf in a pool of water and watch the light carve across a wall as if your finger caught a tube ride on the North Shore in Hawaii. The artist of this innovative piece, Heidi Hesse invites spectators to play with her artwork not unlike New York artist Julianne Swartz. These two artists, who share interests in light and shadow, have been aware of each other’s works and are delighted to be showing together. Swartz’ truncated pipes function as portals to an alternate world of upsidedown scenes. At the entrance to the gallery, one of her pieces she calls “cameraless video” provides morphed vistas of the street outside. The show offers a glowing array of interesting art. Tucson’s own Gwyneth Scally shows what can happen to fragile bodies living in the desert sunlight and Warehouse District neighbor Ned Schaper of Mat Bevel studios energizes the room with his kinetic wheel chair-shopping cart man. On July 5, Lights will be split-screened with another lively exhibit.
Fade in on Camera, opening on July 5, an exhibition representing 20 artists who are using the camera as a tool to investigate identity. Curator Vikki Dempsey, Program Director of Access Tucson, talks about a community possibly existing within this group of artists. “Their identities are in a constant state of negotiation. By exploring identity, they are in the process of communion and only as they are in communion with themselves, can they find community with others. The camera documents and produces evidence.” Dempsey is pleased to bring such an exceptional exhibit to the warehouse gallery. “The audience will explore a range of topics from parental approval to love letters, from burkhas to public nudity and from cheerleading to unwanted body hair. The exhibition is experienced through single channel videos, photography, mixed media, digital interactive media and installation depicting the subjective details, a sense of passing time and the eros of everyday life.” Dempsey is also a video artist, who might be recognized as the curating mogul behind Video Tensions/Alternate Routes, a decade-long summer series of cutting-edge videos. Her video installation, Somewhere in Between was featured at MOCA last fall. With her expertise in the underground film scene, one can expect a reel experience as the Camera exhibit jump cuts to Interior Screening Room, Night for Friday screenings of films not seen at your local cineplex. Dempsey and independent film and festival guru Giulio Scalinger are currently working on a program of films that will intrigue audiences. In this innovative collective exhibit, without Lights, there’s no Camera and without Camera, there’s no Action.
Pan right to Action, opening on August 2, curated by Joyan Parsons Saunders, Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona in Art, Studio, Intermedia and Photography. Saunders’ work in video, installations and photographic tableaux has been exhibited internationally, including expositions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, and the Berlin International Film Festival. We know that this exhibit involves performance and video installation, but the particulars will have to remain a mystery until opening night on August 2. Even MOCA director Anne-Marie Russell is kept somewhat in the dark but she did know enough to give a hint to whet our appetites. According to Russell, the clue is embedded in the theme of Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics.
Lights opened on June 7 and will be juxtaposed in dialogue with Camera on July 5 and Action at its August 2 premiere. Junkspace continues it’s exhibition through the three series. Opening receptions on July 5 and August 2 are from 7-9pm. The Camera exhibit’s screenings at The Screening Room will be held on Fridays, July 11, 18, 25 and August 1 at 7:30PM. Call 624-5019 for information on all exhibits and 622-2262 for information on films shown at The Screening Room. That’s a wrap!
