Final Dream Fringe November 14, 2008

FINAL DREAM FRINGE at Swarm Gallery
Featuring work by:
ERIK FRIEDMAN
and REUBEN MARGOLIN

Project Space
STAR GATE | GARETH SPOR

November 14 - December 21, 2008
Artist Reception | Friday, November 14, 2008, 6-8PM

FINAL DREAM FRINGE explores the inspiration drawn from the beauty of nature and urbanity, and the logic of mathematics and technology.

Erik Friedman's work focuses on investigating the landscape in which he resides, an industrial and severely depressed section of East Oakland. He looks closely within the seemingly bleak visual landscape and discovers where bright, beautiful, and hopeful intrusions occur - a visiting carnival, for example, which offers a distraction from the languid and somber landscape. Inherent in all this, has always been a realization that there is a very real and strange beauty to the landscape, however fractured and evaporated it may seem. Erik's latest work is an endeavor to explode the spirit of urbanity, introducing moments of quiet beauty in which elements of the detritus fall calmly within a pictorial space from a different era.

Reuben Margolin's large-scale kinetic sculpture captivates viewers with fluid movement. Best known for his "Wave" pieces, Reuben's work invites contemplation from a variety of perspectives: as a mesmerizing kinetic sculpture; as a visualization of the complexities of wave motion and related scientific and mathematical concepts; and as an intricate and beautiful mechanical device. Reuben's work combines the logic of mathematics with inspiration drawn from the beauty and patterns of nature. His work has been shown at the Exploratorium, the Aquarium of the Pacific, Chabot Science Center and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

The images displayed in the installation, Star Gate, are generated from the closing scenes of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Set in a past future, 2001 concerns the human race's encounters with a series of mysterious black monoliths, evidence of an enigmatic race of technologically advanced alien beings. In the film's closing scenes, the protagonist Dave Broman is taken by these beings, on a fantastically rendered trip through vast distances of space and time to meet the film's mysterious conclusion. To generate the images in this installation, frames from these scenes have been processed through a transformation where the familiar roles of space and time are rotated, generating an unnatural or alien perspective where space is compressed to the horizontal dimension and time is rendered static along the vertical.

While perceptually, the dimensions of space and time are qualitatively different, in the realm of mathematics they can be abstracted and manipulated in a number of ways. It is possible that our perception of space and time is just a peculiarity of our native biological apparatus. If so, it follows that we could speculate on alternative perspectives on these dimensions; these perspectives being just as valid as the one we are accustomed to. Maybe this manipulation of space-time is what today, we achieve through art; yet instead of on the physical plane, we operate on the psychic plane of the viewers and those who experience our actions. The act of art can be seen as an intervention in the logical, linear sequence of events that make up reality, encouraging us to pause, reflect and sometimes reconfigure our knowledge and understandings of our world.

In the film 2001, the manipulation of space-time is the act of a highly advanced civilization, their technology indistinguishable from magic. The sequence of events is depicted with a mysterious, abstracted visual style and left to the viewer to interpret whatever physically transpires. Much in the same way as these final scenes are bizarre and mysterious, the ultimate outcome of this installation is up to the subjective interpretation of the viewer.

Gareth Spor received his MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2008 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006 (Thesis: Amacrine Cell Inhibition Refines the Spatio-Temporal Filtering Properties of Ganglion Cells).

Official Website: http://www.swarmstudios.net