Image conscious

A stimulating show of video art by New York and Atlanta artists, Solomon Projects’ Objects That Flicker takes as its primary conceit the installation or “object”-ness of video-based works. As video gains in popularity, its makers seem increasingly inclined to exploit the work’s physical presence as an art object beyond a video stuffed into a VCR and displayed on a monitor.
Atlanta artist Michael Dines’ “Cedar at Martin Farm” is indicative — its techie qualities almost entirely eclipsed by the artist’s choice of display. Within a huge 84-by-78-inch, murkily romantic painting of a cedar tree, Dines has embedded a tiny monitor that shows views of the source material: an “actual” cedar from varying perspectives. But viewed through the thick, antiqued, milky glass and seen at a great distance, the video image seems, paradoxically less real than “Cedar” the painting. Though we have come to trust the recorded thing more than the artist’s approximation, Dines’ painting seems to argue for the primacy of a subjective representation, or perhaps demonstrates how all things — whether mechanically made or painted — are tainted by individual perspective.
Arguably the best work in Flicker and proof that many Atlanta artists hold their own next to the art center denizens of L.A. and N.Y., John Daniel Walsh’s “Weekend” packs the most conceptual punch. Shown on a small LCD screen from a distance, “Weekend” is a kaleidoscopic abstraction of moving parts. But on closer inspection, Walsh’s piquant send-up of the manic leisure of the working stiff begins with a tiny, burly, shirtless figure tossing a Frisbee again and again into the infinite white recreational distance. The puniness of the figures in the video, which include Lilliputian joggers, bikers and dogs trotting across the screen like the mechanical flurries of an on-the-blink TV set, only exacerbates the hilarious obsessiveness of their activities. We feel self-consciously savvy about the futility of their lives, much as a child watching ants lords his size over the insects. Before long the screen is filled with a spermatozoa mass of Frisbee-chucking guys whose repetitive motion references the similarly ritualistic aspect of weekend leisure.
Though N.Y. artist Janet Biggs’ work is consummately intelligent and visually arresting, her triptych work “Nordcap,” which takes water and movement as its central concern, feels less satisfying than some of her other projects.
Rounding out the exhibition are two wise and jocular works from New York artists David Humphrey and Matthew McCaslin, whose thematic connections seem to end with a shared interest in the video medium. Humphrey’s work is a mutant sculpture of a blue stuffed animal bear crossed with a green piggie that projects from its ass like a Mattel experiment gone terribly wrong. The two lewdly colorful stuffed animals are melded into a two-headed beast and placed like a freak-show object on a white pedestal. On a small monitor, the toy-monster’s twinned consciousness seems to unspool an amusingly suggestive story of life from the stuffed animal(s)’s point of view.
Creating a virtual reality of vicarious experience, McCaslin’s “Himalaya” is the most visceral of the works in Flicker. It aims to partly evoke the sensation of an amusement park ride, from the slow insistent build of the machine’s momentum accompanied by an evocative “you are there” woozy metal sighing soundtrack, to the manic whirling represented as the two TV screens change from an image of people on a fairground ride to a sped-up, abstraction of wildly spinning movement. McCaslin’s virtual ride is placed inside a child’s little red wagon, a low-tech thrill ride answer to this high-tech contraption. Like cinematic prankster William Castle and ’50s spook shows, whose Tinglers and gimmicks and 3-D images aimed to make the image realer than real and inspire a physical sensation in the audience, McCaslin tries to inspire some bodily response through a clever manipulation of object, image, perspective and sound.
Like all of the artists in Flicker, McCaslin is keyed in to the potential of video art to move beyond a static, boxed-in form. And Flicker, a show that takes chances and embraces a medium other galleries might find unmarketable, is a worthwhile examination of the genre’s progress.
Objects That Flicker runs through Jan. 20 at Solomon Projects, 1037 Monroe Drive. 404-875-7100. Wed.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Dec. 24-Jan. 3 for the holidays.