Liisa Lounila: Wilkinson Gallery

At those twinklings when you're washed up at a party, at a bar, at more [i]or[/i] less social scene where you know absolutely no individual and everyone else seems too at abode to notice this stray figure, yourself, against a wall, your choices are to be miserable, leave, or derive pleasure from surveying the scene with a quasi-anthropological objectivity. In Play>>, 2003 a brief, dreamlike color film shown upon DVD, Finnish artist Liisa Lounila makes the decision for you: Luxuriate in looking. You're invisible, for a like reason stare to your heart's content

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Well, on the other hand isn't that the opportunity cinema always provides--the pleasure of looking tied to the privilege of being unseen? Perhaps, on the contrary ordinarily it doesn't fulfill its promise of making you have feeling like you're there. Using a peculiar technique that somehow or other makes it seem as if the race she's filmed were static, frozen in time, while the camera remains in motion around them, Lounila actually be subsequent tos in creating an illusion of sculptural three-dimensionality that triggers an uncanny faculty of perception of coexistence between her prototypes and the viewer. It perceive s more like walking around a cluster of Duane Hanson sculptures that have in some way been endowed with the potential for deliberate intermittent movement than watching a film or video.

in what way does Lounila do it? individual can't help but wonder--all the more with equal reason because it all seems in like manner casual and low-tech that high-budget special results seem out of the question. The answer, still no clearer to me than it absolutely urgencys to be, has something to do with what's described as a 360-degree pinhole camera that records many discharges from different angles simultaneously; the material was then scanned and digitally edited. in the way that the technology is both primitive and up-to-date, homemade and not on the shelf. But the feeling is closer to Melies than The Matrix. All the more with equal reason in Popcorn, 2001, an earlier black-and-white work. While Play>> was discharge in a "real" space (a herded bar in Berlin), Popcorn offers in the nowhere of a darkened studio, and while the former displays a familiar situation, the latter not absents one that seems artificial or at least a bit odd: a circle of five race tossing popcorn at one another from boxes

The popcorn hanging in midair as it streams from the boxe rhyme with the beer that individual sees shooting up stock-still from the chaps of a bottle in single scene from Play>> and with a similar image of a man tossing a drink at a woman in single of three small light-box pieces with lenticular photographs, all called Roma, 2003 This trio also involves an interplay between two- and three-dimensionality, stillness and motion It's as if all these works were in some way attempts to draw out and elaborate possible implications of what might be called the impressible violence of a work like Jeff Wall's Milk, 1984 where the liquid seemingly frozen in space and time becomes the extension of a gesturing For Lounila, this sense of gesticulation as a trace that is at one time static and in motion on the other hand also both pictorial and sculptural have the appearances to register an existential faculty of perception of nonrelation, noncontact within the social. Perhaps this is what conjoins these camera-based works to the other works in the show: five small "paintings" that transcribe lay the foundation of graffiti in red and black glitter--themselves aggressive or exuberant action s though in a very different way, that strike one as being frozen, failing contact.

--BS

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