Victoria Fu, a visual artist who received her B.A. from Stanford University and M.F.A. from CalArts, opened her latest exhibition, Bubble Over Green, on Monday night in the former KAGRO building located in Station North.
Fu, who currently resides in San Diego and Los Angeles, is being hosted by The Contemporary, Baltimore’s nomadic contemporary art museum. Bubble Over Green is The Contemporary’s first formal project since reopening in 2013, following a successful speaker series entitled Co-Hosts, which brought notable names to the art space including Andrew W.K. and the Geurilla Girls.
The exhibition’s opening reception on Feb. 23 was preceded by a lecture given by Fu herself in MICA’s Fred Lazarus Auditorium.
Fu’s work takes characteristic elements of film — narrative, character and setting — and fragments them across a space to generate holistic chaos. As soon as the viewer feels they have successfully latched onto a concrete storyline or persona, the screen will flicker, a jump cut will change the scenery or an audio clip will come through the speakers and consequently disorient anything that felt momentarily familiar.
“Art is about watching ourselves watch something,” Fu said.
These are the main components of the installment Velvet Peel 1&2, a combination of looped videos projected high on a portion of the main gallery wall called the frieze. The videos star two red-haired dancers who interact with ever-changing backgrounds, primarily of natural scenery and various desktop screens. New textures, like water droplets or steam, layer over the setting to hint at everyday immersions, like a shower or a rainstorm, but they never quite fit with the rest of the setting.
The dancers, two ambiguous members of a variant universe whose landscape can be changed with a simple touch screen-style swipe, seem interchangeable. However, rather than using their hands to perform this gesture, Fu audibly directs the dancers to use their butts instead, a move she said was her own take on the way humans so rapidly internalize touch screen interface language.
In her artist lecture, Fu described her peculiar gut reaction to the discovery of touch screen gesture charts, publicly published illustrations of screen swipe maneuvers for every type of smartphone. These gestures have become part of our bodies’ own interfaces without us even realizing it. She emphasized the importance of more broader sensory experience.
“Acknowledging more and more what your body encounters, not just your eyes,” Fue said. She manipulated basic touch screen gestures in “Velvet Peel” to highlight this concept.
Meanwhile, the exhibition’s eponymous film Bubble Over Green plays on an eye-level flat screen by the far left gallery window, practically in a room of its own. Fu prefaced the work in her lecture, saying that it was the result of her “thinking about layers of post-production.”
A 13-minute loop with color and sound, Bubble Over Green inverts a normal artistic process with layering and movement. Two different pairs of hands — a man’s and a woman’s — put down multiple sheets of colored or metallic paper and lay bubble wrap over them.
However, the hands ultimately tear or scrape away at what could have been a finished product in order to start all over again. In addition to the physical action of layering that the hands carry out, the video itself has several tiers of depth, and the hands often disappear or blur under a layer they have just produced.
For all of her current artwork’s visual and auditory stratums, it’s hard to believe that only a decade ago Fu began working with simple 16mm film. She used this as a starting point for her artist lecture, first projecting a digital representation of a plain celluloid image.
“What about the material and technological process has changed the way we represent time and space?” Fu asked her audience.
While she acknowledged the obsolete nature of many of these processes, Fu still managed to explore their artistic potential.
“There’s something cinematic about what remains,” Fu said.
She sees no need to discard the old methods or try to force the idea that movies are still exciting and relevant, citing the unusually strained atmosphere at the 2015 Oscars as an example of this rhetoric. She wants to take both the remains of so-called “post-cinema” in stride to produce new, meaningful work.
“It’s up to artists to push new formats,” she said.
In addition to her cinematic art, Fu’s exhibition also included two neon works. These too draw not only upon her earlier thoughts concerning the intersection of touch screen interfaces and human physicality, but also upon the gallery space itself.
At the nighttime opening, “Pinch-Zoom” glowed bright blue as it methodically flickered between the two finger formations of the touch screen zoom process, projecting its light through the window and onto the KAGRO parking lot. On a white wall at the other end of the gallery, the red neon “Ribbon-Swipe” looked more like an artistic manifestation of a dancer’s wistful movements than those of a standard touch screen user.
Again Fu invites the beholder to recognize his or her own subconscious actions within those she displays and where those actions fit in the scope of their everyday lives.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Bubble Over Green exhibition lies in its ability to make the audience think about the gallery space as well as their place in it.
Glowing neons reference familiar technology, related audio emanates from all parts of the room, and narratives deconstruct to the point where “putting yourself in the character’s shoes” is no longer feasible. All the while the viewers must try to position themselves in the fragmentary quality of it all.
In a time when the mechanics of film and communication flow seamlessly into a production’s framework, Victoria Fu’s art emerges as a unique participant in the both the world of the moving image and the new age of interactive technology.
Bubble Over Green is on view at 101 W. North Avenue in Station North, from 4-8 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays from now until April 3.
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