“ech_o”
June 14 - August 1, 2008
Gallery hours:
Wed. - Sun., 12- 5 pm
Curated by U.T. Dallas graduate Mary Benedicto, ech_o is an exhibition of video art in which new and old technology unite in a tour de force of pictures, patterns and images. Artists deploy video cameras and computers as though paintbrushes of yore as electronic equipment become tools for self-expression.
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"Remembering Our Future Selves through the Screen"
by Charissa N. Terranova, Ph.D.
Remember? We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants [nanos gigantum humeris insidentes]. Which is to say: we are nothing without thinkers who came before. We are even smaller without the thoughts of the Ancients.
Curator, video artist and futurist Mary Benedicto has collided the ancient past into the near future in the exhibition Ech_o. For Benedicto, “echo” refers to the rat-a-tat-tat of noise and fusillade of images emanating from twenty-one seven-inch screens. The digital pings and patterns of this band of sound-image artists make an orchestra of runaway and run-about pixilated form. Sounds and signs pass back and forth giving new form to the acoustical effect of the echo. The physics of the echo is defined according to sound waves reflecting off of a wall. In the instance of Ech_o, reflection occurs between screen and screen rather than bell, footstep, voice and wall. Adding an underscore, Echo becomes Ech_o, and we recognize we are in a new millennium and well into the age of the Internet.
Adjacent to the physics of the echo there is the ancient myth of Echo. Ovid wrote of the nymph Echo in Metamorphoses [8 CE], a narrative of the history of the world shot through the prisms of various transforming beings. If Tiresias was Ovid’s transgendered blind seer, then Echo was his feminine disembodied repeater.
Being the voluble gal that she was, Echo used her voice to help Zeus in his procurement of pleasure with the nymphs on the Ionian mountain slopes below. Echo held Juno, who was en route to find her prevaricating husband Zeus, verbal hostage so the nymphs could get away. As punishment, Juno took away Echo’s ability to speak except for repeating the last words of another in conversation. Later, Echo would literally evaporate from a broken heart. Her love of oblivious Narcissus left her without appetite, and all but her voice – the repetitive feed back loop of Echo – withered away.
We continue to tell Echo’s tale for good reason, not merely to fill the air with words, like Echo herself once did, or simply as a matter of passing the time with the beauty of Ovid’s lyricism. Rather, there is need at the root of repeating this story. The myth of Echo has told people who they are – from the Hellenes of antiquity to the Philhellenes of the nineteenth century to the Robo Sapiens of the present. Mythology is a building block of identity. Echo and Narcissus are personality types – Echo the overweening caregiver and Narcissus the insensible egotist.
Benedicto gives body to a new of character in Ech_o, helping us to remember who we are in the near future. In recasting the myth of Echo as Ech_o, she lays bare the upside of technology’s potential dehumanization. Technology is the midwife of a post-humanist ontology. It diminishes the extreme self, the overweening and insensible, transforming her, the self, into Robo Sapiens, the cyborg being of the new millennium. In the coalescence of twenty-one screens by twenty artists, Benedicto declares that the screen makes us who we are in the twenty first century. We watch therefore we are.
Below are two columns of words. On the left are the names of each artist and on the right is an echo in terms that reflects his or her work in Benedicto’s Ech_o.
Ayman Alamoudi. . . . . . . . .. . .stalwart water
Robert Flowers . . . . . . . .ghost in the machine
Brian Fridge . . . . . . . . . . . light and/in space
Vanessa VanAlstyne . . . . . . . . . . .dot matrix
Mary Benedicto . . . . . . . . . . undulating pores
Garman Herigstad . . . . . . . . . . into the void
Gregg Biermann . . . . . . . .refracted urbanism
Kim Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vulvar chic
Greta Poulsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Hysterica
Jesse Meraz . . . . . . . . . . . . . metastatic sky
Randall Garrett . . . . . . . . . prism to Heaven
Kyle Kondas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . digicity
Erik Tosten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . red noise
Christi Nielsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . inner skin
Tony Vincenti . . . . . . . . . . . . .layered code
Frank Dufour . . . . . . . . . . Tarot’s tomorrow
John Davenport . . . . . . . .pretty vermiculate
LeeAnn Harrington . . . . . . . . . . .light oasis
Paul Slocum . . . . . . . . . . . . .que sera sera
Max Kazemzadeh . . . . . . . . . .talking heads
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“Fast images and fast media” represented in the videos playing simultaneously in the Ech_o exhibition simulate the barrage of media and information we currently encounter in daily living. In Ech_o, video cameras and computers become the new electronic paintbrush or medium for the artist and “electronic equipment become tools for self expression.” The artists render perceptions via the video screens, making references to what they know, the electronic multicolored world around them. The omnipresent television and technology directed visual dialogue is at hand. The new technological ambient surroundings affect the artist’s tactile sensibilities and what they produce. “Artists of the electronic world piece together art as they feel and perceive it (much of which has cartoon like tactility).”1 This art is created mostly inside and behind computer stations, most of which are at home. “This is the art of the indoor,” echoing the digital.
— Mary Benedicto, curator
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1 Jeffrey Rian, The Generation Game pgs.67-69
Many thanks to Dr. Linehan for his support and funding toward the brochure.
Special thanks to mentor John Pomara.
Brian Fridge and Paul Slocum courtesy of Dunn and Brown Gallery.
Erik Tosten courtesy of Mighty Fine Arts Gallery.
