The work of Columbian artist, Nelson Vergara, explores the relation of the viewer to visual stimuli that are meant to disorient. In the video installation, “Anni,” the artist creates a completely dark space that submerges the viewer into an illusion of perspective that operates through the displacement of the body in space. Upon entering the darkened room, we immediately seek points of reference and orientation and are, instead, greeted by the flickering and shifting image of a woman rendered in red that creates the illusion of perspective and asks us to complete the experience using our imaginations to look for different foci. The spectator interacts with the image in space using an instinctive reaching of the physical body and intellectual abilities. Using the false construction of perspective, Vergara’s work constructs the seductive image, the unattainable object of desire, in whose presence we disappear into an intangible distance.
In “Time Frames (surveillance)” Vergara converts the real-time shifts in traffic on a busy street into an undulating abstract photographic image. In the projection, colors and forms are added and drained out due to circumstances dependent on time – the light of dawn and dusk, the profusion of cars and trucks during rush hour and the stillness of the dead of night. The static images captured from the video form their own abstract constructions in which our eyes wander over the geography of the almost unidentifiable street and its nodes of action.
Also centrally concerned with capturing time, DC-based artist Chad Yencer, has created a series of drawings that he describes as “aesthetic variations of time.” They explore the instant of a beginning that grows and continues to evolve in space. The viewer’s awareness of time in Yencer’s abstract drawings, at times almost scientific or biomorphic is heightened by way the images convey the duration of their making. We can imagine the procession of lines and dots at the hand of the artist. The patterns and images, though, don’t have a beginning or end, and in their meandering and circling, stories are told. Speaking of an implied beginning, the artist says, “if language is eliminated from the equation, a simple point can become the instrument to describe time’s existence. This point can represent one [moment] of time that can no longer be dissected. What follows is the chart of time and its movement through space.” Dot by dot and line by line, the drawings emerge as the unfolding of the path of time, but do not insist upon any one understanding of it.
