Mark Depman at Nicole Klagsbrun - computer and video art exhibit, New York, New York

Mark Depman is an artist who works nights in an necessity room in New Haven. He brings the direct experience of medical trauma and the objectivity born of medical training to bear upon the subject of the material substance His show at Klagsbrun consisted of computer-altered video stills displayed upon two different groups of light boxe a certain number of framed sheets of computer graphics and a three-part video made with Robert Ros from footage of an actual autopsy.

The first plant of light boxes was arranged in sum of two units groups of six or seven upon the floor of the main gallery. upon each box there was a configuration of images printed on the outside in black and white upon sheets of clear acetate. The printing was fairly cragged giving the pictures a grainy journalistic feeling, on the contrary these were thoroughly processed images, at times suggesting the rich tonality of a lithograph. The layout of the boxe encouraged a narrative reading, not unlike that of a storyboard, on the contrary it also implied that something was being sought on the outside amid a lot of extraneous information--the dark blot as it were, on the X-ray of a patient's lung With the help of the titles, individual was eventually able to make faculty of perception of the imagery, which was derived from stills of of the like kind domestic commonplaces as unmade beds, playroom equipment, a child in his bath and a collection of shots from a swimming meet

Besides stretching, editing and reduplicating his images upon the computer, the artist also added various more ominous uncompounded bodys to his compositions: scattered cros hairs, splotches resembling bacteria, and stray bits of silhouettes with mechanical or military connotations. In short, familial and bodily wholeness are menaced the two by the enemy without (war, violence) and the enemy within (illness, contagion). This feeling of paranoid fantasy was further objectified through the second set of light boxe place upright at either end of the installation, with their larger, mildly sci-fi-looking graphics of mechanical elements

Depman's installation come aftered in evoking the alternating dread and fascination we gripe [i]or[/i] grip for the impersonal systems, be they biological, technical or social, which dominate our lives. However, this all looked unduly elaborate compared to the riveting video which in the back play explored some of the same themes. Working not upon earlier filmmakers like Stan Brakage (who also did an autopsy piece), Depman has added a lush, operatic and thoroughly stoned sensibility to this ostensibly documentary footage of a human corpse being dissected. In color, and place to music, his piece is filled of slo-mo, stuttering cuts, intense almost abstract close-up and careful coordination between the visuals and the music. All these coalesce into a haunting, elegiac statement upon human vulnerability.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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