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JIM DRAIN AND ARA PETERSON: HYPNOGOOGIA |
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Written by Joe DiRosa
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Deitch Projects is pleased to present Hypnogoogia, a collaborative
installation by Jim Drain and Ara Peterson. In this incredible
cumulative show, 18 Wooster St. is transformed into an interactive,
spinning landscape-- a psychedelic music of the spheres featuring work
produced by the artists over the past two years.
Moving through corridors of rainbow pinwheels, a huge kaleidoscope
hallway, and four exactingly gorgeous geodesic sphere-shaped paintings
rotating slowly on the ground and ceiling, the viewer becomes immersed
in their lyrical, spherical environment. Hypnotically spinning on the
first platform is a twelve-foot rainbow ottoman, and above, a video
feed throwing the spinning participants on the wall upstairs.
This show brings to ambitious fruition much of the imagery with which
Jim and Ara have been working for the past few years, where radiant
disks and morphing spherical forms found in their collages, wall
drawings, and video projects, are found here expanded to full
three-dimensionality and human scale. Evocative of Duchamp’s
Rotoreliefs, hypnotist’s spiral devices, fun house accoutrements and
late 60’s
environmentalist architecture, the conjunction of the multiple types of
spinning spheres have the effect of transporting you to a different
state of receptive consciousness.
As suggested by the title, distended by the extra roundness of a few
O’s, one uniting theme of the exhibition is can sometimes catch while
nodding off, a heightened-reality high, where sensory data is enhanced
and isolated in a waking dreamstate. The subject of the cult book
Hypnagogia, by Andreas Mavromatis and of so much interest to the
Surrealist movement, the hypnogogic state can feature visions, voices,
weird insights and unusual sensations that greet us as we drift out of
consciousness. Faces may appear, threatening or comical. A landscape
may open up, with distant mountains and wide, expansive vistas.
Geometric forms, jewels, diamonds and intricate patterns may dance
before our mind’s eye, not unlike those seen under the influence of
certain psychoactive substances.
Jim and Ara are two Providence-based artists who have been
collaborating in different ways over the past ten years, initially as
two members of the group Forcefield, whose exciting project in the 2002
Whitney Biennial was one of the major events in new artmaking
today. This show brings together work from the artists that has
been presented at other venues around the world in their past exciting
year. The
geodesic spheres were developed in collaboration with Eamon Brown
during a residency at Pittsburg’s Mattress Factory, one sphere being
shown in the Lyon Biennial, 2004, curated by Bob Nikas. Some of the
pinwheels were a component of the Wiggin Village installation at the
Moore Space in Miami, December 2004, curated by Larry Rinder. A smaller
version of the kaleidoscope piece was first shown at
Greene Naftali in 2003. This exhibition will have a catalogue available January
Ara Peterson, Jim Drain and Eamon Brown, Kaleidoscope, 2005, Mirrors, DVD projection
November 04 — January 28, 2005
18 Wooster Street, New York
www.deitch.com
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