SPECTROGRAPH: Maximus Clarke + Ted Hayes

Opening: Friday, August 19th, 2011. On view until August 28th, 2011

Can images and sounds be understood through their decomposition—and how are we to decompose them? Maximus Clarke's and Ted Hayes’ split show at Devotion Gallery peers through images and tears apart sound in an effort to limn their boundaries and recapitulate them in new forms, consuming their source media in the process.

Clarke's "3DOLATRY: Constructions + Deconstructions I-VI” is a series of anaglyph stereographic portraits that evoke a hyperreal yet synthetic continuum, then morph into impossible compositions that subvert both the 3D medium and the truths of vision itself. (Anaglyph 3D glasses will be provided for viewing the images.)

Hayes' “Deconspectrum” guts our monolithic perception of sound and lays out its component viscera in the form of flickering, colored light-cubes, leaving them out in the open to decompose into a new and unprecedented autonomy.

Max Clark
3DOLATRY: CONSTRUCTIONS I-VI 

BACKGROUND: 

Stereography is a medium almost as old as photography itself.  As it rose to prominence in 19th-century bourgeois visual culture, it was instrumental in highlighting the gap between reality and sensory perception, and in causing artists to question the "realism" of monocular linear perspective.

But over the last century, it has mainly been a cinematic novelty, subject to commercial exploitation when the film industry has been threatened by emerging media formats.  The 3D movie booms of the 1950s, 1980s, and the present day have each been sparked by Hollywood panic over the rise of new competitors: first television, then the VCR, and now HDTV, filesharing, and mobile devices. 

Some critics predict that the latest 3D bubble is already about to burst.  But the wide availability of digital image capture and processing technologies means that stereography need no longer be merely passively-experienced entertainment.  More easily than ever before, artists can seize and experiment with the means of stereographic production and reproduction.

Stereography is commonly understood as a more realistic method of visualization, but it is actually a more elaborate form of optical artifice.  This paradox is the conceptual foundation of Maximus Clarke's exploration of the medium.  Grounded in a reading of stereo vision as a biological, aesthetic and technological phenomenon, his stereoscopic imagery aspires to heighten the viewer's consciousness of the subjectivity of sight, the synthesis of spectacle, and the limitations of technology, thus achieving what Saskia Korsten has called "reversed remediation" [http://dare.uva.nl/document/188776].

Clarke works in the nostalgic, primitive anaglyph format, which uses colored filters to send distinct images to each of a viewer's eyes.  While some reject the anaglyph process for its color distortions, Clarke affirms this characteristic as an aesthetic texture.  Most of the anaglyph works he produces are monochromatic -- essentially, "black and white" 3D rendered in red and cyan.  Within this intentionally constrained palette, his images become intense, purified studies of form, space, and tone.  The collision of heightened dimension and insistent unreality creates an uncanny tension.

WORKS

The 12 digital C-prints presented here comprise 6 portrait sets from Clarke's ongoing 3DOLATRY anaglyph portraiture project.  The featured subjects are Lindsey Case, Maximus Clarke, Michael Doyle, William Gibson, Chris Ianuzzi, and Maud Newton. 

Each set features 2 versions of the same stereo-imaged subject, composited against the same stereo-imaged background; in most cases, subject and background were photographed separately.  Each subject is pictured with some form of vision-mediating eyewear, an allusion to the artificial nature of the portraits and the format.

1 image in each set is "clean" -- a composition whose perspective, lighting, and stereoscopic properties approach as closely to classical realism as possible.  The other image introduces distortions, ambiguities, and conflicts between left-eye and right-eye views.  Through the deconstruction of each composition, Clarke probes the contrivances of stereography as a medium, and the boundaries of stereo vision itself.

BIO 

Maximus Clarke [http://maximusclarke.com] is a photographer, video artist, and musician based in Brooklyn, NY.  He grew up in Miami, studied literature at the University of Florida, and received an MFA in film from Florida State University.  Since 2002 he has created electronic music, videos, and performances under the name Maxx Klaxon [http://klaxon.tv].  He has been featured at venues including The Knitting Factory, Galapagos, Monkey Town, and Webster Hall, as well as at the 2007 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.  For the past 5 years he has co-curated SPLICE [http://splicenyc.org], an NYC-based electronic multimedia performance series.  In 2010, he began exploring the medium of anaglyph stereography.  He is currently developing interactive 3D audiovisual performance works.