A new academic year always invites inspiration. For those seeking such a boost from the arts, faculty members (and practicing artists) Nadav Assor and Chris Barnard’s work in, respectively, “Ruins of the Map” and “Engagement Party” provides a thought-provoking beginning to the year. Their work will be displayed on the first floor of the Cummings Arts Center Galleries until Oct. 20, 2013.
Beyond the drawn black curtains of Gallery 66, viewers can watch Professor Assor’s exhibition, entitled Strip/ Lakeshore East. A camera mounted on a bicycle recorded continuous scenes of Chicago during all four seasons and various times of day: lonely garages lit by yellow lighting fixtures, parks with developments on the horizon and underground tunnels. The clips appear more than once, but they shift slightly during each showing. They flow collectively, creating a digital panorama across the walls. The rhythms of the piece coupled with the humming of the soundtrack give the space a relaxing feel.
In Professor Assor’s work, themes of nature versus urban development appear in every shot. Panoramic scenes of lush parks contrast with the coldly lit cement floors of various garages. Often, both landscapes merge, uniting the natural and the man-made. Professor Assor encourages audiences to question how urban development has altered nature. He states on the video-sharing website Vimeo that the landscape of Chicago “has been completely transformed by human artifice…in the process losing any sense of a consistent ground plane or uniformity of locale.” This change creates “violent oppositions between landscaped parks… three-level underground highways…luxury-living condos… all stacked on top of each other within less than a square mile.”
Professor Assor has experimented with various media, including performance, sculpture, installation and digital prints. Video in particular attracts him because “like the body, [the subject] is always in constant motion—and when digitally controlled, it can become almost alive, almost a performer.”
Professor Barnard’s exhibit, Engagement Party, fills the other two galleries. He has centered Engagement Party on the idea of how “the military-industrial complex has a lot to gain from perpetual war” and how it seems to be “simultaneously omnipresent, yet invisible.” Barnard’s work gravitates toward imagery of warplanes flying over sporting events, museum spaces and exhibitions because they “celebrate military power and destructive force” by “glorifying that power and/or encouraging spectators to become de-sensitized to those war machines’ actual purpose and capability.”
Offensive depicts four warplanes aligned as a diamond rising into the sky. They leave simple streaks of white air that join together at the base of the 84-by-62-inch canvas. Offensive exemplifies Professor Barnard’s observation that the “U.S. has been at war for over 10 years, and this has become somewhat normalized.”
Naturally, the other works in Engagement Party seek to accomplish a similar goal. In comparison to Offensive, they are not as light in color or as minimal in composition. Gateway Drug depicts a cluster of eerie, robotic machines. At first, the dystopian color palette of Gateway Drug, Homo Erectus and Mother seduces the viewer into looking at the pieces, much as the paintings in museums and sporting events of Barnard’s paintings enthrall their own spectators. Barnard especially chose his color scheme to display the foreboding nature of normalizing militarism. As he says, “I hope there is enough that seems off, dark or at least different from a celebration of these machines so that the audience questions how they really are supposed to feel about what they are looking at.”
Professor Assor and Professor Barnard hope that audiences will leave Cummings with new insights. For Professor Assor, part of the takeaway of viewing his video is that audiences will have a “sensory and cerebral experience—communicating an inkling of my very personal, very subjective movement through a complex urban terrain, while eliciting thoughts and questions about the way we normally perceive or are informed about these environments.”
For Professor Barnard, people would ideally “think about their relationship to the military-industrial complex and to this country’s use of violence. I hope we are all critically re-visiting and re-examining that position and how we come to it, because there are more powerful people than us who certainly are.”
