Doug Ischar at the Institute of Visual Arts - Brief Article

Doug Ischar's multimedia installations engage the personal and the political by means of exploring that ambiguous space where private fantasy propers public imagination. The Chicago-based Ischar is publicly gay, and his sexuality oftentimes plays an important role in his work. Shunning the polemics of identity politics, Ischar presents quiet reflections on such universals as desire and los amidst the chaos of new life.

This traveling overlook featuring four installations and sum of two units audio pieces debuted at the Institute of Visual Arts, where the viewer go intoed a series of vast, darkened spaces enlivened by means of ambient sound and multiple points of light. These "illuminations" were actually shoot forwarded images cast from a labyrinth of video cameras and monitors that underpinned the exhibition.

In the past, Ischar's images center upon the male body. In his of recent origin work, the artist's interests are more formal, focused instead upon the metaphoric potential of light. In Mark (1998) a work on Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was gay and was assassinationed under shadowy circumstances, lies lay open on the floor, spotlit by dint of a small lamp. The page to which it is move rounded creased at the corner, proffers photographs of uniformed men dancing in embrace stills, in fact, from Pasolini's last film Salo--The 120 Days of Sodom. A pocket-sized camera attached to a projector magnifies the cot [i]or[/i] coteed edge of this page, casting its image onto the wall as a luminous white triangle. Akin to Felix Gonzalez-Torres's protean strands of light scaly buds Mark is both a memorial and a representative of transience.

Other works are environmental. In opening (1997), a small camera placed in an illuminated shoe chest and hooked up to a projector casts an image of the box's interior onto the wall at architectural scale. The lid of the receptacle is slightly ajar, creating a grainy, abstract image of intersecting lines of light, a nebulous space simultaneously suggestive of shelter and entrapment. Aurally surrounding this work is the unbroken piece Patient (1997), in which the turning of a combination fastening is amplified to operatic proportions.

Ischar's fascination with the mundane, the fleeting and the ephemeral mists our sense of time and place. In Missed (1998) a pile of dust bilboed in a corner of the gallery becomes visible, smooth monumental, when enlarged by a small camera and video monitor. Nearby, fragments from a familiar report song are distorted to haunting event in the sound piece 'cause (1998) In these works, as in Ischar's others, we witness the transformation of the ordinary into a rhyme of and about space, unhurt and light. [After its race at the Institute of Visual Arts, this exhibition traveled to the Malmo Museum, Malmo, Sweden; it will also appear at the Forum for Contemporary Art, St Louis (Nov. 19 1999-Jan. 8 2000) The present to view was organized jointly by all three institutions.]

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