ART REVIEW : Wedemeyer’s Animated Eccentricity

Robert Wedemeyer’s odd contraptions, ordinary photographs and the hand-crafted cameras in which they were made look as if they belong in a science-fair booth at school. Combining an earnest student’s enthusiasm for learning how things work with a hobbyist’s love of do-it-yourself inventions, his functional art is animated by its eccentricity.

Wedemeyer’s 10 pinhole cameras at Pasadena City College Art Gallery are awkward boxes carefully constructed from plywood, metal latches, rope, compasses, mirrors, magnifying glasses and a transparent pantyhose container filled with water. Each low-tech device serves a single purpose that seems, simultaneously, sensible and absurd.

A series of five photographs in which the scale of the objects depicted decreases incrementally is displayed behind the five specialized “Scale-Image Cameras” that were used to make them. The lenses of Wedemeyer’s gerrymandered cameras aim downward between four wooden supports.

The most compact camera is a squat little box whose short legs position the lens close to the ground, resulting in close-up pictures in which things appear to be twice their actual size.

The lengths of the other cameras’ legs increase mathematically. The tallest has spindly, eight-foot supports that allow for wide views, in which objects appear to be one-eighth their actual size. The legs intrude into all the pictures it generates, crowding out whatever else is depicted.

Wedemeyer’s “Scale-Image” photographs thus replay the history of Modernist photography as a funny, scientific demonstration. As the distance between each camera’s lens and the ground increases, the resulting images become increasingly self-referential. The world outside the photographic process shrinks in scale until it nearly disappears into a shadowy absence at the far ends of the longest camera’s legs.

Wedemeyer’s other pieces are even more outrageously dysfunctional. Made of cheap plastic lenses and seashells that cover one’s ears, his “Virtual Reality Simulator” is a silly send-up of the real thing.

The water-filled lens of his “Gravity Camera” ensures that all its pictures are blurry close-ups of the ground. His “Semi-Cinematic Gestural Image Panorama Camera” functions like a low-budget movie camera, producing images that resemble abstract filmstrips.

In Wedemeyer’s flat-footed exhibition, practical, goal-oriented behavior takes a turn toward the sort of purposelessness that is conventionally reserved for modern art. An American ethos of tinkering and inventing devices that function efficiently is effectively transformed into a selfish obsession. With this sort of unproductive labor, the processes engaged are more satisfying than any quantifiable results.

* Pasadena City College Art Gallery, 1570 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (818) 585-7238, through Sept . 16. Closed Saturdays and Sundays.