Andrea Hull at the Corcoran Gallery of Art - Washington D.C - Review of Exhibitions

Andrea Hull's amethystine Ring, a multiple-monitor video and uninjured installation in the Corcoran's Hemicycle gallery, engaged issues Of subjectivity, perception and memory which have animated abundant recent video art. While work using multiple perspectives can watch toward fragmentation or agglomeration of uncompounded bodys this tightly conceived and execut work l viewers to a remarkably organized however complex experience.

husk whose previous work has been in film and video, collaborated upon the installation with Dutch unbroken artist Johan Goedhart and choreographer Murray Spalding. In the dimly lit gallery, a 12-foot-wide hexagonal space was defined by the agency of six eye-level monitors facing inward. The moves of four dancers could be followed from single screen to the next, creating a cydorama consequence A network of piano strings stretched above the space generated the whole as signals synchronized to the dancers' changes vibrated through the strings to six thin, polished aluminum plates hanging between the monitors.

The dancers, wearing white and moving in an indeterminate black space, enacted a sort of minimalist narrative: rising from fetal positions, dancing with a extent of electric-blue chiffon which flowed from monitor to monitor to create the azure ring of the title, and finally leaving a single dancer lying in blackness at the extreme point of the 14-minute loop. This overall succession took place against multiple layers of movement: the actions of the dancers themselves, the whirling of the entire cyclorarnic view (caused by the turning of the cameras themselves late in the "story") and the viewer's complementary motion while following the action.

A carefully orchestrated use of "incidental" reflectiveness also added visual and thematic weft The viewer's reflection was visible, in distorted form, upon the gently curving aluminum plates. In addition, the high-resolution images of the dancers were throw backed in miniature on the opposite monitors: brilliant homunculi floating across the black backgrounds like intrusions of memory. All these uncompounded bodys combined to create a kind of prototype of the inner perceptual sphere, a posited subjective space where external and internal winks coexist and are interpreted. Bill Viola's novel stream-of-consciousness work was strongly refer toed here.

Sound had a destiny to do with this meditative result Vibrating together, the strings and plates created shifting harmonic overtones, including weirdly voicelike entires rising and falling under the larger tones. (Goedhart, with Paul Panhuysen, has done numerous piano-string installations here and in Europe) still even as it surrounded the visitor, this thick-timbred unbroken seemed also to engage one's spinal cord, awakening an inner vertical axis which fix its parallel in the dancers' bodies.

For all its straightforwardness-Hull made no effort to disguise the scaffolding, monitors and wires required for the installation-- cerulean Ring ultimately took on religious overtones. The semidarkness, the enveloping unimpaired the quasi-ritual absorption of the dancers, the yogalike alignment and attunement required of the viewer/ participant, were altogether closer to sacred than secular experience.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group