The Santa Fe New Mexican (New Mexico)
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
December 21, 2007 Friday

Hey waiter, there’s an I in my soup!

by Elizabeth Cook-Romero, The Santa Fe New Mexican
ENTERTAINMENT NEWS

Dec. 21–Once upon a time, a literary critic, a mezzo soprano, a
painter, a novelist, and a few other people shared a summer rental.
Someone put apple juice in a bottle labeled "maple syrup" and stuck
it in the refrigerator. The next morning, the novelist made waffles
for everyone. The yellow stuff in the bottle looked too watery to be
maple syrup, so she didn’t use it. The painter noticed it wasn’t the
color of real maple syrup. The singer heard the sound of juice
sloshing in the bottle, and she too realized it wasn’t syrup. Before
anyone could stop him, the literary critic read the label, opened the
bottle, and dumped apple juice on his waffles.

Artist Peter Sarkisian thinks we are all too much like the
literal-minded critic. Sarkisian calls his works — which incorporate
videos projected onto shaped plastic screens — perceptual traps.
They are designed to push viewers into realizing that many of the
things we see or hear in the media are either invented or pale
reflections of real life.

A show of four works by Sarkisian opens at James Kelly Contemporary
on Friday, Dec. 21. Their screens are molded of clear plastic that
has been sandblasted to create softer white surfaces for
high-definition video projection. They’re set into the walls, and the
gallery is darkened.

Ten days before Sarkisian’s show is to open, his artworks are stored
in a garage that has served as his temporary Santa Fe studio for the
past two years. Only one piece, Extruded Video Engine # 1, is
assembled and in working order. It is switched off and hidden behind
a white curtain. Pieces of other works — plastic screens that evoke
toy guns jumbled and stuck together, wooden frames, and video
projectors — sit on shelves and lie against walls.

The artist is not afraid of drama. He not only explains the concepts
behind his work, he pretty much tells his life story before turning
off the lights and unveiling Extruded Video Engine #1. It buzzes and
squeaks. Backlit, it glows in jewel tones of yellow, red, blue, and
green. Its vacuum-formed screen is shaped like the innards of a
giant, cartoonish wristwatch. It’s animated by a video loop of gears,
flywheels, and rods, all moving at different speeds. Two blue ribbons
twist through the piece, and words set in white type momentarily
appear, zipping along the curving forms. People who are attracted to
the written word will probably try to make sense of the bits of
narrative, Sarkisian explains. He has spent months creating snippets
of information that will capture the imaginations of viewers. Words
and sentences scurry by and dissolve; stories begin, then disappear.
Like the mislabeled jar of apple juice, Sarkisian’s words are sure to
mislead us.

With his three-dimensional video assemblages and his lack of
discernible story lines, Sarkisian aims to make the viewer more
active. He wants to create artworks that, like books, make viewers
less passive than they are when watching TV or movies. "We bring
ourselves, our imagination, and our life’s experiences to reading a
book," Sarkisian says. "I’m giving viewers a set of ideas, but they
are not complete. You have to bring what you know — your sense of
history."

Sarkisian has been working with video sculpture for a half-dozen
years, but back in 2002, his screens formed cubes. Then, he says,
some of his works had a beginning, middle, and an end. One example,
Dusted, was featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and
the 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Its five
screens formed a cube less than 3 feet square. At the beginning of
the video, the glass cube appeared to be lined with soot. As dancers
in the video moved, their shoulders, feet, and hands attracted the
soft, black powder. As a result, the cube became more transparent,
but the dancers’ darkened bodies became harder to see, and viewers
became more perplexed. Much like the text in Extruded Video Engine
#1, Sarkisian wanted the soot in Dusted to leave viewers unsatisfied.

"Sometime around the Whitney Biennial, I felt I was going into the
same ground over and over," Sarkisian says. "I started thinking about
volume. I started to think about wrapping a screen around an image."
Turning to look at Extruded Video Engine #1, Sarkisian says he’s
still amazed at the way each "gear" fits into a raised, round portion
of the screen.

As a beginning filmmaker, Sarkisian was fixated on technical details
like camera angles. But he reached a point where he was bored by
technique. "You reach a certain level of control, and then you move
past it," he adds. "I’m not saying I’m totally in control. But I’m
trying to get past that romance with the medium. … Now I’ve come
full circle, and I’m interested in stories again."

But the stories in Sarkisian’s videos at James Kelly Contemporary are
impossible to follow. Sarkisian recorded the bits of narrative that
flash through Extruded Video Engine #1 from eyewitness accounts of
some of the 20th century’s greatest tragedies, including the
1915-1918 Turkish massacre of Armenians. Powerful fragments of that
story, based on the recollections of a survivor, can snag a viewer’s
attention, the artist says. But the story line devolves before the
survivor’s memories have time to unfold.

"Cameras all over the world are gathering information, and [those
filmed images are] passed off as experience," Sarkisian says. The
narratives in films and television programs are, in their own ways,
as fragmented as the text running through Extruded Video Engine #1,
but too often they are accepted as real.

Much of Sarkisian’s work springs from a make-believe world, and that,
he says, is part of its point. "All video is a cartoon — from the
moon landing to Bugs Bunny. It’s a soup of information without
reality." Sarkisian insists we have entered a world of such mediated
experiences.

Perhaps Sarkisian is naive, but he seems to be suggesting that art
can wake people from their secondhand dream worlds. Rather than wine
and cheese, he might serve waffles at his opening. Guests could be
asked to choose between bottles of apple juice and maple syrup, all
mislabeled. Stopping and looking at the color of the liquid,
smelling, and listening might put observers in the right frame of
mind to approach Sarkisian’s work. Those with sloppy, juice-soaked
refreshments might get the point that it’s time to stop waiting to be
entertained and start paying more attention to our senses.

details

–Peter Sarkisian

–Opening reception 5-7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 21; exhibit through Feb.
23, 2008

–James Kelly Contemporary, 1601 Paseo de Pe