Doug Ischar at List Visual Arts Center - Cambridge, Massachusetts - Review of Exhibitions

"Orderly," Doug Ischar's installation that incorporated silent video, film and other mediums, established a furtive atmosphere smooth before the content registered. A small, dim field was lined with diminutive viewing and screening devices-- light-boxes, softly whirring Super 8 projectors, a tiny Sony Watchman rapiered in the pocket of a leather utility belt slung from a wall hasp and miniature video projectors, a certain quantity of of which were set upon head-high tripods that rendered them vaguely anthropomorphic (they have the appearanceed to scrutinize the flickering images they projected) The shields of a pair of video monitors were filled through indistinct circles that created a double-barreled image suggesting scanning (or unfocused) binoculars.

The spare presentation was a conformation for ruminations on history, the military, masculinity and homosexuality, with mixed overtones of nostalgia, prurience, voyeurism and suspicion. Super 8 projectors call up home movies of the innocent 1950 while the tiny, black (and, in this adjoining matter sinisterly named) Watchman alludes to technology's intrusion into private lives. Ischar's images and existences are disparate and sometimes obscure--particularly to those outside gay culture-as they balance specific respects to personal and national biography.

The interconnected images of Florida, Florida start with a small shoot forwarded film still of apple-cheeked, fair Claude Jarman, Jr., the child star from the 1948 film The Yearling (set in Florida), superimposed on a surreal photomontage of Fidel Castro's head floating upon the surface of the ocean. nearest is a larger, moving projection of singer Chad Horton, a small light boy, performing before halftime concourses at the Tampa Superbowl in January 1991 The following image, a 1962 Life "Picture of the Week" of a grinning and dripping John F Kennedy at the beach, present to views him amid a press of adoring fans (one of whom irregularly appears to be tweaking his nipple); Kennedy's image in the vicinity of Castro's call forths the Cuban Missile Crisis, which a certain number of believe was provoked by macho posturing--and which in make go round brings to mind the large bay War that started in the same month as the Tampa Superbowl The last Florida, Florida image is a 1958 color close-up of an orange, its surface mottl with pesticide damage, according to the exhibition checklist. This work reverberates with plus ca change ironies: environmental screw-up the mixing of football and war metaphors, mythic men and famous lads defining the parameters of American lives.

Night organ of visions more succinctly layers ecological and cultural ironies, bringing to life the Izod crocodile type by projecting onto a real shirt a clip from a 1945 film of a man wrestling an alligator. In Lifer, the Watchman piece, clips of a freshs report about gays in the military are combined with views of lavatory stalls. Ischar's work weaves gay and mainstream tillage high and low technology, past and not absent into an evocative, intelligent composition.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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