A Future-Shock Sideshow of Technology and Fantasy

P.T. Barnum and advanced computer technology occupy very different parts of the popular imagination. But at Art Center College of Design’s Williamson Gallery, they come together in a boisterous exhibition of prints, sculptures and videos by 24 artists who use up-to-the-minute software. Combining the sleazy appeal of a sideshow with the futuristic look of digital imagery, “Situated Realities: Where Technology and Imagination Intersect” is a virtual circus, a shamelessly entertaining spectacle that says a lot about the media-saturated world in which we live--like it or not.

Organized by Will Larson for the Maryland Institute College of Art, the accessible show is entirely composed of representational images. Most are both phenomenally realistic and utterly unbelievable--like the special effects in Hollywood movies aimed at the male teen market. All are crafted to the highest standards. And many are huge, measuring up to 4 by 8 feet.

Among the most eye-grabbing is a pair of C-prints by Charles White. In one, a bare-chested man displays the decapitated head of a reptilian beast. A shirtless boy, his skin glistening with sweat, pokes at the freshly killed trophy with a long stick, revealing fangs that put Dracula to shame.

The second print depicts a young couple in bed, fighting off the advances of a creature that resembles a cross between a scrawny troll and a hairy alien. Sinking its teeth into the man as it tugs at the woman’s T-shirt, the fiendish intruder gives comic form to the fears and fantasies of adolescent sexuality.

Less action-packed but more creepy is Anthony Goicolea’s “Class Picture,” a group portrait of a dozen blond schoolboys who not only wear the same uniforms, haircuts and expressions, but have identical bodies and facial features. In another computer-generated image, a group of nine contented clones hauls buckets of snow through the woods. In neither picture do Goicolea’s people act as if anything out of the ordinary is going on.

Mind-blowing weirdness is also a matter of dull routine in Margi Geerlinks’ pair of color prints. The first shows a disaffected woman knitting a child-size body suit out of yarn, which gradually transforms itself into human flesh. The second portrays a gray-haired man laboring away on a sewing machine, from which spills the body of a lithe nude. Both clinically surreal images bypass the messy humanity of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation for the antiseptic perfection of Pygmalion’s maiden.

Mutant fusions take place in the works of several other artists. Daniel Lee’s four sepia-toned Lambda prints portray the futuristic offspring of people and beasts, including a pig, a lion, a snake and an owl. The collaborative team known as Aziz + Cucher has printed large images of machine parts made of flesh, which resemble props from a David Cronenberg film. And Simen Johan’s four silver prints meld found and manipulated images to link childhood and sexuality. Harking back to Lewis Carroll’s photographs of lovely little Lolitas, Johan’s budding vixens radiate innocence alongside more troubling sentiments.

Gregory Crewdson and Craig Kalpakjian lavish similar attention on exteriors and interiors. No people appear in their images, which have the presence of stage sets for dramas awaiting viewer participation.

Crewdson loads his scenes with juicy details that suggest an absurd world gone wrong. In one, hundreds of slices of Wonder Bread form neat columns on an undeveloped slice of suburban property as turkeys, pheasants, ducks and woodcock look on. In another, a dead fox lies beneath a canopy of half-eaten grapes.

Next to Crewdson’s Baroque clutter, Kalpakjian is a Minimalist. His image of a gently curved hall captures the go-nowhere inertia of modern bureaucracies. A looped videotape follows the endless corridor, taking viewers in circles.

Jeff Weiss, Anna Ullrich and Martina Lopez also fabricate fantastic landscapes. Juxtaposing images found in family scrapbooks and magazine advertisements, they use computers in the same way that early 20th-century artists used scissors and glue to make collages, cutting and pasting bits and pieces to form illogical dreamscapes.

Yasumasa Morimura, Dieter Huber and Kathy Grove limit themselves to art history. Morimura inserts himself into imitation masterpieces. Huber makes big color prints of imaginary plants that mimic the format of Karl Blossfeldt’s black-and-white photographs. And Grove sets up studio shots of famous works by Brassai, Muybridge and Lange, whose compositions she alters.

While the works by these three artists aspire to please insiders with their studious cleverness, those by Alexander Heilner, Robert Lazzarini and Euan MacDonald prefer gags that don’t assume viewers are art historians in training. Heilner’s graphic designs are less engaging than the advertising campaign for a popular brand of vodka, in which various artists’ trademark works fill the silhouette of a bottle. Lazzarini’s super-realistic sculptures of a skull, a phone and a pair of hammers--all distorted as if seen at extremely oblique angles--grab your attention but fail to do anything with it. Last year’s attacks on the World Trade Center overshadow MacDonald’s videotape of two jets flying side by side, even though he made it in 1998.

The least captivating works are the most abstract. Andreas Muller-Pohle’s eight Iris prints present thousands of overlapping numbers, letters and symbols. A wall-label states that it’s a digitally coded representation of the first known photograph, but you have to take that on faith.

Natalia Blanch’s five metal sculptures, on which lines and ridges are etched, resemble gigantic petrified microchips. If not for the wall-label, you’d never know that her mute works are visual translations of her readings of spiritual texts, whose titles she doesn’t disclose. Likewise, Jim Campbell’s ghostly LED portrait sometimes flickers and at other times stands still. The alteration occurs when it shifts between digital and analog processes. This makes sense when you learn that it depicts Harry Nyquist, a mathematician who developed an equation about the relationship between digital and analog information.

The remaining works resemble maps. Mark Campbell changes the paths of urban rivers by collaging aerial photographs. Collaborators Bill Outcault and Lilla Locurto transcribe the contours of their bodies to two dimensions, subjecting their distorted portraits to the same changes that take place when globes become maps.

Like Muller-Pohle, Blanch and Jim Campbell, they embrace a formulaic sort of formalism, one that treats new technologies as filters through which the same old information is passed. In contrast, the most ambitious works in the exhibition throw their lot in with the tawdry amusements of popular culture, leaving viewers free to interact on their own terms.

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“Situated Realities: Where Technology and Imagination Intersect,” Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, (626) 396-2200, through July 6. Closed Mondays.