Cyber Arts Festival

In choosing an exhibition to go see as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, the exhibition by Denise Marika stood out most to me. Her exhibition entitled Orpheus and Eurydice includes photographic prints from video projections. The description from the cyberarts festival website reads...

"Orpheus' world, our world, is torn by chaos, war and violence while the underworld Eurydice inhabits is structured, peaceful and allows her artistic freedom of expression. She chooses to stay, he seeks to bring her back, their struggle caught in this moment."

The artist, Denise Marika, is Boston based and works mainly with site specific video projections and multi-media installations which she uses to embed a moving image into a physical structure. The main subject she uses is her own body which she uses to record activities or personal rituals dealing with issues such as control, power, and vulnerability. Her video work concentrates on the nude form or a the figure(s) repeatedly performing a task. It is essentials sculptures determining filmed actions.

When I first walked into the Howard Yezerski Gallery, where Orpheus and Eurydice was being exhibited, I couldn't even see the work. After looking around and finally asking someone she pointed me to a back room where 3 large digital photographs hung on the wall amidst cardboard boxes and a filing cabinet. I was shocked at the conditions at which they chose to exhibit the work and I am sorry to say that it definitely took away from my experience. I had done a little research and had seen some thumbnails of the work and was anticipating seeing it for myself. The quality, in my opinion, wasn't much better than what I had already seen through a computer screen. I took my boyfriend, whose also an artist, along with me to give his insight into what he thought of the exhibition.

Q. What did you think of the exhibition space?
A. The boxes laying around and the filing cabinet in the same room, on top of the extremely confined space really created a kind of feeling of being somewhere you were not supposed to be. I felt like I had accidentally walked into the back supply room of an office and had to leave before someone saw me. I'm not sure that even without the boxes and filing cabinets the room was large enough to accurately display the work.

Q. Do you think the exhibition space took away from the viewing experience, from the actual work?
A. Definitely. The condition in which you were viewing were extremely distracting. I had a hard time really focusing in on what I was to be looking at. The room was cramped, and the yet it had these large photographs on the wall kind of bombarding you, yet your not particularly drawn to them. I think this is so because of the space created around them.

Q. Putting the location aside and concentrating on the actual work, can you see the connection of how this is new media?
A. Not being completely familiar with new media and what it totally is, I think I can still make the connection here. Using the video projection of moving images onto concrete objects seems like a new idea, and a new technique to me. To me, new media uses the advances in technology to enhance the artistic experience. I think she is definitely do that here. Maybe not in the actual exhibition that we viewed because those were photographs from an actual installation instead of the installation taking place in front of me.

Q. Do you think this artist created the war-like struggle she was going for?
A. I think she definitely did, I can sense the hostility in the work.

Q. What do you think helped to convey that?
A. The blurriness of the figures, the color, the sense of the struggle in the pose. The tension in the pose is what really created that atmosphere. The way in which it was displayed here, photo print outs of stills, doesn't seem like the best way to view her work. I would really like to see the actual installations in progress.

In conclusion, unfortunately the surroundings of the piece took away greatly from my experience there. I was under the impression from the blurb on the cyberarts site that I would be seeing a video installation. I was disappointed to see that it was only stills from that on display. However, the stills that were shown were very powerful on their own. I could still get the emotion intended for the viewer from her work just from viewing the stills. I can only imagine the emotion seeing the actual installation would evoke. I was happy to go out and experience first hand new media at work in my community. It was exciting and inspiring as an artists to see the work new media artist gaining recognition in my own community. I anticipate participating for years to come in experiencing artists at work in my own surroundings.



Some websites of interest:

http://www.denisemarika.com/

An interesting article about one of her works:
http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/retrieve.pl?issue=issue41§ion=article&article=A_CONVERSATION_WITH_13132753