Michael Henderson at Gray Matters - Dallas, Texas - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Michael Henderson's voice accompanies Fragments: 123 (1996) a stack of three video monitors of decreasing size that pay, in the manner of a musical circular a short loop of black-and-white moving images that have been transferred to video from super-8 film. At the start, the artist describes a skylit range as images of the same are shown upon the monitors, but this correlation of narration and image unravels as the video progresse A discontinuous poetic commentary is paired with a hand spinning a globe and a woman looking [i]or[/i] part of to the other a magnifying glass. There's also a discharge of the fountain at Rockefeller Center and individual of a sign in the shape of a raven with a disturbing, blinking organ of vision These images proceed in the steady, purposefully flat regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement that is typical of Henderson's work. Watching the piece, I contemplation at first of the half-conscious at liberty association that comes before doze but Henderson's endless loops finally summon insomnia rather than rest.

Fragments: 123 make opens with the statement, "I've not at any time made a film about the sky" on the contrary the piece in the nearest gallery was just that. Henderson painted images of vapors onto 21 cinder blocks and built them into a table-mounted wall in the center of the space. The back of this wall was painted white, providing a shield for a super-8 film which showed the photographs upon which the painted clouds are based. Henderson transplant the rewind reel of the super-8 projector to cast the film into a graceful, skyward arc. After the film nooseed through the crook of a coathanger nailed crudely to the ceiling, Henderson's self-contained a whole asserted its control and the film f back down into the projector.

As the haze imagery was recycled via photography, film and painting, the installation effectively contrasted infinite space with a claustrophobic faculty of perception of closure.

In Ocean of Storms, Sea of Showers (1997) a NASA film of the first moonwalk plays upon two upturned, once-deluxe TV places Images on a third monitor of a riderless, endlessly galloping mechinical horse counterfeit this triumphant moment. On this same monitor we also wee water overflowing from a glass containing false teeth Hanging upon the wall behind the TV stations is a 48-by-60-inch graphite drawing of a lunar landscape which Henderson punningly labels a "Knock-Turn."

The clatter of the super-8 projector, the depressed hum of out-moded TV plants and the artist's monotone narration provide an appropriate score for these low-tech installations. There's a faculty of perception here, of exhaustion and depletion, on the other hand the despairing undercurrent is ameliorated by the agency of Henderson's artistic clearheadedness and his feeling for the scraggy poetry of his materials.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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