March 29 - May 31, 2003
Locust Projects
Miami, Florida
Fiction (Melancholic Landscape), Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at Locust Projects, Miami FL (Destroyed).
Fiction (Melancholic Landscape):Looking outside the limitations of our species' biological perception is presented as deceptively easy. We merely look through a telescope, a microscope, these tools have been integrated as extensions of our perception as an organism. We today forget that these technological extensions were several thousand years in development and were hotly contested when they first arrived on the scene. Hume and Berkley in their philosophical work both make the point that these tools do not produce observation, but mediated observation. Think of the images from the Hubble telescope and how they are always tinted or altered to make these images more 'readable'.
What if we were biologically capable of the kinds of refocusing that these technologies allow? Not just a night vision or infrared scope (a la Predator) or some other cinematic technique (camera lenses actually restrict the normal visual field), but something more substantial. Imagine an ultra wide-angle vision, such that almost the entire horizon is visible. Some chameleons are said to have this kind of visual structure. Wouldn't that ability to see in an almost 360° arc make us radically different by nature?
This mural is meant firstly to be an experience, an attempt to activate most of the areas of vision that film has to edit out in order to have credibility (peripheral vision as on example). I often think of Douglas Trumbull's work in films (2001, Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and how I always wanted those moments to be totalizing: the frame always killed the experience. By constructing "Fiction" in a way that keeps the eye moving, by optically blurring the corners, hopefully the viewer will start to speculate on these sorts of ideas. The black hole image, probably one of the first or last things the viewer will see, for me has become another expression of the gulf between our perception and the Real: if we could punch through that barrier there would be a total annihilation. What any idealism requires is a suspension of disbelief, a destruction of Reality (the rules by which we observer the Real).
Any idealism is going to be frustrated with the limits set by the 'scientific fact' of our day. Idealism does not react well when confronted with any absolute or boundary. Idealism is impatient, that is why it has tended to be an engine promoting radical change. This impatience makes an idealist seem to be almost manic-depressive or melancholic; constantly shifting it's gaze from what could be to what is not. This kind of 'visionary' speculation has been pushed mostly to the periphery, but there are images and icons, which persist in culture.
The UFO and the Unicorn are perhaps the two most rampant images of the non-scientific idea of the Other. Couched (and often dismissed) as symbols of pure fancy, pure fantasy or wish fulfillment, their representations of 'what if' have a recurring but peripheral fascination in a materialist culture that claims to operate according to the rules of science and ration. These iconic images stand in the mural as representatives of science fiction and fantasy, marginalized genres, which I have identified as exemplars of non-scientific speculation. Their presence seeks to qualify the distorted landscape, a place where utopian ideal (a ring of technology around a world) and catastrophic apocalypse (nuclear devastation) live in simultaneous tandem. This is the melancholic's vantage, the realization that every moment stands on the precipice of possibility, between unimaginable success and total failure.
- Jesse Bransford
Plan of Fiction (Melancholic Landscape), Latex, marker and graphite on wall. Installation at Locust Projects, Miami FL (Destroyed).
Image and subsequent: Fiction (Melancholic Landscape), Latex, marker and graphite on wall.
Installation at Locust Projects, Miami FL (Destroyed).
FICTION (MELANCHOLIC LANDSCAPE):
A SITE-SPECIFIC MURAL BY JESSE BRANSFORD
In the project room: GLEXIS NOVOA
March 29th- May 31st, 2003
Opening reception: Saturday, March 29th @ 8pm
Watching Crazy Legs beak dance in slow motion on a bootleg videotape is a little like watching Dave Bowman at the end of Kubrick's 2001.
Watching Dave Bowman at the end of 2001 is an exercise in imagining what the world would look like if we were allowed a wider field of vision, a different way to look at things.
What if we could see what he sees beyond the frame? Fiction (Melancholic Landscape), a wraparound mural that Jesse Bransford will produce at LOCUST PROJECTS, is in part a meditation on what the post-Monolith Dave Bowman sees and we cannot, on what would happen if we had an ultra wide-angle lens for a retina. What would we see beyond the field of vision (and the frames of reference) that we have organized the world with? Bransford's murals explode the constraints of our visual frame and in the process all the other frames that it stands for -those of rational scientific knowledge, of utopian thinking, of visionary otherness. Expect sci-fi lansdscapes, UFOs, Unicorns and fantastic narratives, because it is only at the edge of the real, where strange couplings take place, that Bransford's idealistic restructuring of the world can begin to set roots.
In the project room, Glexis Novoa will also investigate frames and their disappearance in a site-specific wall drawing. But where Bransford looks for what is beyond our frames of reference, Novoa explores what happens when their boundaries blur, when landscapes and memories and apocalyptic sci-fi and historical catastrophes and Kafkaesque socialistic theories all collapse into the same space and meld into a single, hybrid image. The grave sadness of Novoa's dystopic drawing will be a song of experience to Bransford's dazzling Technicolor song of innocence and desire.- Gean Moreno
LOCUST PROJECTS is sponsored, in part, by The Dade Community Foundation with support of The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, The Cultural Affairs Council, The Mayor, and The Miami-Dade county Board of County Commissioners. Novoa's work appears courtesy of Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
Locust Projects
Miami, Florida
Installation at Locust Projects, Miami FL (Destroyed).
What if we were biologically capable of the kinds of refocusing that these technologies allow? Not just a night vision or infrared scope (a la Predator) or some other cinematic technique (camera lenses actually restrict the normal visual field), but something more substantial. Imagine an ultra wide-angle vision, such that almost the entire horizon is visible. Some chameleons are said to have this kind of visual structure. Wouldn't that ability to see in an almost 360° arc make us radically different by nature?
This mural is meant firstly to be an experience, an attempt to activate most of the areas of vision that film has to edit out in order to have credibility (peripheral vision as on example). I often think of Douglas Trumbull's work in films (2001, Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and how I always wanted those moments to be totalizing: the frame always killed the experience. By constructing "Fiction" in a way that keeps the eye moving, by optically blurring the corners, hopefully the viewer will start to speculate on these sorts of ideas. The black hole image, probably one of the first or last things the viewer will see, for me has become another expression of the gulf between our perception and the Real: if we could punch through that barrier there would be a total annihilation. What any idealism requires is a suspension of disbelief, a destruction of Reality (the rules by which we observer the Real).
Any idealism is going to be frustrated with the limits set by the 'scientific fact' of our day. Idealism does not react well when confronted with any absolute or boundary. Idealism is impatient, that is why it has tended to be an engine promoting radical change. This impatience makes an idealist seem to be almost manic-depressive or melancholic; constantly shifting it's gaze from what could be to what is not. This kind of 'visionary' speculation has been pushed mostly to the periphery, but there are images and icons, which persist in culture.
The UFO and the Unicorn are perhaps the two most rampant images of the non-scientific idea of the Other. Couched (and often dismissed) as symbols of pure fancy, pure fantasy or wish fulfillment, their representations of 'what if' have a recurring but peripheral fascination in a materialist culture that claims to operate according to the rules of science and ration. These iconic images stand in the mural as representatives of science fiction and fantasy, marginalized genres, which I have identified as exemplars of non-scientific speculation. Their presence seeks to qualify the distorted landscape, a place where utopian ideal (a ring of technology around a world) and catastrophic apocalypse (nuclear devastation) live in simultaneous tandem. This is the melancholic's vantage, the realization that every moment stands on the precipice of possibility, between unimaginable success and total failure.
- Jesse Bransford
Installation at Locust Projects, Miami FL (Destroyed).
FICTION (MELANCHOLIC LANDSCAPE):
A SITE-SPECIFIC MURAL BY JESSE BRANSFORD
In the project room: GLEXIS NOVOA
March 29th- May 31st, 2003
Opening reception: Saturday, March 29th @ 8pm
Watching Crazy Legs beak dance in slow motion on a bootleg videotape is a little like watching Dave Bowman at the end of Kubrick's 2001.
Watching Dave Bowman at the end of 2001 is an exercise in imagining what the world would look like if we were allowed a wider field of vision, a different way to look at things.
What if we could see what he sees beyond the frame? Fiction (Melancholic Landscape), a wraparound mural that Jesse Bransford will produce at LOCUST PROJECTS, is in part a meditation on what the post-Monolith Dave Bowman sees and we cannot, on what would happen if we had an ultra wide-angle lens for a retina. What would we see beyond the field of vision (and the frames of reference) that we have organized the world with? Bransford's murals explode the constraints of our visual frame and in the process all the other frames that it stands for -those of rational scientific knowledge, of utopian thinking, of visionary otherness. Expect sci-fi lansdscapes, UFOs, Unicorns and fantastic narratives, because it is only at the edge of the real, where strange couplings take place, that Bransford's idealistic restructuring of the world can begin to set roots.
In the project room, Glexis Novoa will also investigate frames and their disappearance in a site-specific wall drawing. But where Bransford looks for what is beyond our frames of reference, Novoa explores what happens when their boundaries blur, when landscapes and memories and apocalyptic sci-fi and historical catastrophes and Kafkaesque socialistic theories all collapse into the same space and meld into a single, hybrid image. The grave sadness of Novoa's dystopic drawing will be a song of experience to Bransford's dazzling Technicolor song of innocence and desire.- Gean Moreno
LOCUST PROJECTS is sponsored, in part, by The Dade Community Foundation with support of The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, The Cultural Affairs Council, The Mayor, and The Miami-Dade county Board of County Commissioners. Novoa's work appears courtesy of Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
