Power Without Resolution

Theater wunderkind Peter Sellars explained after a San Diego performance a few years ago that, for him, it was enough to give his audience a series of experiences. Plot resolution, narrative logic and coherent structure are not essential, he implied; strong impressions are.

Many of the installation artists whose works are on view during the 2-month-long program, IN/SITE 92 (under the auspices of Installation Gallery), seem to operate with the same directives in mind. Their works have presence, power even, but when it comes to pinning down the meaning behind the gestures, one is left mainly with amorphous sensations, the suggestion of importance, if not the thing itself.

This is enough for director Sellars, and, if it is enough for viewers of the current installations, then stimulation and satisfaction can be had throughout town.

Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery is presenting installations by Marcia Olson and Nanette Yannuzzi Macias that skim the surface of deep, social phenomena relating to the way women take control of their bodies and their lives. In a mixed-use building downtown, Jason Tannen has blended literary and cinematic impulses to create a rich and moody installation. At Mission Brewery Plaza, Installation Gallery has organized several installations that each have their evocative, provocative moments, including a quietly moving work by Judit Hersko, an atmospheric environment by Adolfo Davila, and a quirky, participatory space by Melissa Smedley and Olav Westphalen.

Olson’s installation, “3,584 Patterns and Counting. . .,” at Palomar, is the most physically enveloping of the current offerings. It occupies two of the three rooms of the Boehm Gallery, filling each from floor to ceiling with materials relating to the craft of sewing. Olson, a graduate student at UC San Diego, has covered the walls of the larger gallery with an orderly mosaic of pattern envelopes illustrating garments for women and children. She has carpeted the floor with unbleached muslin and wrapped a sewing machine and ladder in the same gauzy fabric.

On a wooden table in the center of the room, Olson has placed four handmade books that help give this work both heart and soul. Though the room is compelling as sculpture, what it has to say about the way women’s behavior is “patterned” and regimented does not surface with much impact except through the books, which are made from waxed pages of old sewing instructions. Olson applied texts to these pages describing her recent road trip home to South Dakota and her encounters with women in both Southern California and the Midwest who have sold or donated old patterns to support the artist’s project.

Through these diaristic entries, Olson subtly critiques the system of confinement that women have been subjected to by prevailing fashion, but she also shows how women have humanized that system, how they have personalized and individualized their craft and come to regard the tissue-paper patterns they work with as skin, as family, and the old buttons that fill a sewing basket as part of the history of that family. A gentle reverence for women’s industry and ingenuity pervades the space.

Olson shares the Palomar gallery with Macias, whose work, “The Interview, The Journey and Claiming Death,” never quite congeals, but provides flashes of powerful visual and verbal imagery. Macias has erected an arched tent-like structure draped with white nylon in the center of the darkened room. Its wide opening splits into two passages not unlike the way a torso gives way to a pair of legs.

An interview of a surrogate mother, adapted from a journal article, can be heard from a speaker within the structure. Another speaker, near the entrance to the structure, plays a short piece about a journey through a body part, suggestive of the process of birth. And a third speaker at the back of the structure plays a taped statement proclaiming the desire to claim death on one’s own terms. All three recordings address the issue of control over one’s own body, but in alternately diffuse and gripping terms.

Like the Boehm Gallery works, Tannen’s installation, “Shadow Town,” in an old church building downtown, also establishes its emotional tenor through environmental means. In the most effective part of this work, Tannen has furnished a small room in the manner of a slightly seedy hotel room, complete with a soundtrack of telephones ringing endlessly, feet thumping up the stairs, as well as an occasional scream and siren. Tannen has effectively set his environment in the fertile zone between reality and fiction by cleverly fusing real space and represented objects. The phone, light fixture and other furnishings, for instance, are sculpted and painted, rather than actual and functional. The window shade is pulled most of the way down, but a small slice of a view is provided by a photograph of a street scene propped between the window and the sill.

Tannen, a local artist, quotes the writer Raymond Chandler in his wall statement for the show, and the influence of old detective novels and films can be felt throughout. In the recreated hotel room, a picture hanging askew affords a look through a peephole in the wall, where Tannen projects slides of an empty street at night, an abandoned lobby, a table full of letters and photographs. These stills, as well as the row of related black-and-white prints hanging in a separate room, are thick with melodrama and intrigue.

The photographs, hotel room and a third area made to look like a police desk are of a piece, thematically, but they are not well integrated spatially. Plastic sheeting defines their boundaries and patches of open space without any character stand between the vignettes. Despite this structural flaw, Tannen’s installation has a wonderfully moody feel, somewhere between the paintings of Edward Hopper and the environments of Edward Kienholz.

Smedley, a recent graduate of UC San Diego’s Master of Fine Arts program, and Westphalen, a student there, have titled their installations at the Mission Brewery Plaza separately, but there are no demarcations where one begins and the other leaves off. Smedley--who, with Westphalen, is present during most open hours--describes the relationship between the installations as that of “co-mingling.” What both artists have done with the large mezzanine space is infuse it with a feisty attitude, a smart, spirited sense of experimentation and pseudo-science.

Rube Goldberg-like contraptions hang from the ceiling and line the walls, offering visitors everything from a belly massage by a shield of vibrating water tubes to an opportunity to establish rapport with another visitor by wearing matching silicone goggles with blinking lights inside. Everything is touchable and in process--these are ideas working themselves out on the spot. A large chair pieced together from wood, shovels, clamps and cushions faces a desk, suspended from the ceiling. It is a work area, and the notes and musings that litter its surface change daily.

Smedley and Westphalen activate this space through their own presence and the presence of their creations, making it a vibrant, participatory kind of theater. The artists’ long, co-mingled statements about the installations help clarify their conceptual ambitions, but essentially, these are works to be experienced directly. Parts are tedious, others ridiculous, but there is still something exciting about being in the buzzing epicenter of an idea, still fluid, seeking a functional form.

Also in the Mission Brewery Plaza, Tijuana artist Davila has created a stirring space for communal lamentation called “The Celebration is Over.” A circle of crates on the floor surround a cross formed by lighted votive candles. At the top of the cross sits a television monitor showing a continuous pattern of abstract shapes and emitting sounds of religious chanting.

Davila’s accompanying statement identifies the era now ending as a 500-year-long period of genocide, after which will follow “the celebration of 500 years of Indian resistance, preservation of their cultures, languages and traditions.” The just, insistent tone of Davila’s statement has power in its own right, but it fails to intersect with the installation itself, which is poignant and thick with bittersweet memory.

Hersko’s installation, from the “Black Forest” series, also addresses a genocidal chapter of history in an oblique manner. She has mounted three pairs of glass panels several inches away from one wall. The shape of the panels, as described in another section of the installation, mimics that of a wide ribbon bow commonly worn by girls in Black Forest villages. Hersko has printed each glass panel with an image in transparent ink, so that it is difficult to read on the glass surface, but the shadow cast behind it on the wall is crisp and distinct.

Reading shadows is, in itself, a highly suggestive act, and Hersko, who lives in San Diego, has made the content of these panels as subtly absorbing as their form. The first panel shows a country girl tending geese in the forest. With each subsequent panel, the child becomes outnumbered by the geese and, ultimately, obscured by a typewritten list of names. The list, in German, documents the fates of numerous Jewish women of Bonn, fates which range from emigration to deportation and death.

By visually overlapping the quaint image of German country life with the tragic truth of the Holocaust, Hersko has encapsulated some of the most compelling aspects of history--its relativity, simultaneity and seeming contradiction. Her installation, though diluted a bit by related works in glass and lead, leaves a strong impression--as strong on the eye as in the gut.

* Marcia Olson’s and Nanette Yannuzzi Macias’ installations continue at Palomar College’s Boehm Gallery, 1140 W. Mission Road, San Marcos, through Nov. 11. Gallery hours are Tuesday 10-4, Wednesday and Thursday 10-7, Friday and Saturday 10-2.

Jason Tannen’s “Shadow Town” remains on view at 930 E St. (enter through gate at buildings southwestern corner) through Oct. 24. Open Thursday through Saturday 12-4 and by appointment (688-9531)

Installations by Melissa Smedley, Olav Westphalen, Adolfo Davila and Judit Hersko continue at the Mission Brewery Plaza, 2150 W. Washington, through Oct. 31. Hours are Friday and Saturday 12-5 and by appointment (260-1313).