Jessica Bronson at CRG - Brief Article

The centerpiece of Jessica Bronson's novel exhibition was a mesmerizing video of digitally altered lightning imagery played upon a white, wall-mounted monitor. To a pulsing soundtrack of electronic music, the night firmament becomes a cosmic blackboard for flashing filaments of light. While the opening succession is fairly straightforward, before drawn out the tendrils of light are doubling and tripling, creating momentary patterns which give an inkling of synapses, electronic circuitry and traces of atomic activity in a mist chamber. Urban skylines appear below, and high-rise buildings become dangerously entangled in skeins of light. At single point, the lightning even draws the rudimentary outline of a Buddha figure.

Pulling back from the video, individual becomes aware that the quiescence of the installation is just as theatrical. A pair of glowing white discs reposes on wheels on the floor, while to the side another pair of videos--also shown upon wall-mounted monitors--continues the theme of spectacular nature. individual video is magisterially slow, offering an orange-tinted, lunarlike landscape riven with down-reaching cracks. The camera is situated high above, with equal reason that the horizon curves beneath our view. As the camera pans slowly above the arid scene, the orange turf seems to rotate like a beach ball. The flanking video is a roiling fog of white with a dark vortex in the center A tape noose of hurricane footage, the image spirals outward in a ceaselessly moving however ultimately unchanging circle.

single of Bronson's themes seems to be the different orders of time, ranging here from the infinitesimal flashes of the cosmic light display to the near stasis of the lunar landscape, to the unending flowing of the hurricane. Reanimating stock weather and satellite imagery, she makes us aware that weather is our ultimate marvel. Despite the exhibition of ever more sophisticated instruments for analyzing weather, it remains beyond human mastery Thus, the heavenly sideshow provides single of the opportunities in new life to tap into a primitive faculty of perception of wonder.

on the other hand Bronson is not interested in a contemplative immersion in the phenomena of nature a la Peter Campus. Instead, she emphasizes its otherness in a way that give food tos into the contemporary fascination with sci-fi paranoia. The glowing discs, orchestrated flashes of lightning and eerie electronic music recall the pair '50s sci-fi films and their contemporary manifestation in television exhibits like The X-Files. Bronson pepper her nature with hints of alien abduction, suprahuman surveillance and millennial disasters. She appear to bes right on target for the storming of the 21st century.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group