Every once in a while—and I cannot remember the last time this has happened—an art exhibition adopts a provocative, never before seen, truth-telling-concept and executes it so brilliantly that viewers are forced to take stock of what is happening in the world around them. I am not talking about themes which are a dime-a-dozen, but a singular structural device, a single thought, if you will, that not only captures a great many truths, but hems them in from all sides, allowing for those who are still able to think for themselves, no escape. Project Birch Forest series, the brainchild of Russian born, Bridgeport, Connecticut-based artist, entrepreneur Tatyana Stepanova, is a perfect example of one of those all-too-rare art exhibitions that mince no words.   artes fine arts magazine

Presented in 2010 at the White Box Gallery, in two contiguous exhibitions entitled, The Waste Land and Stirrings Still, Project Birch Forest was an incendiary, double-headed spectacle that took no prisoners and stands as a defining event in contemporary art exhibitions. Situated on two floors, ground and basement, each edition, curated respectively by Raul Zamudio and Juan Puntes, features the work—paintings, sculptures, videos, installations, and occasional musical performances—of some sixty artists from around the world. The pièce de résistance of both exhibitions, Stepanova’s conceptual genius in full view, was a score of ceiling-dangling cardboard poles acting as trees within which live—well-hidden at that—a great many artworks waiting to be discovered (see above, right). The trick, like Little Red Riding Hood, is for the viewer to negotiate this forest without being eaten alive.

White Box was, and still is, arguably, the most political—one might even say subversive—art gallery in New York City. Diminutive in size, big in both reputation and ambition, it was the perfect space in which to have mounted Project Birch Forest. The magic of both of these back-to-back exhibitions began in the gallery’s small ante-chamber, a kind of waiting room that served both as an introduction to the exhibition and a stern warning for the viewer – aided and abetted by the powerfully insistent art on view – to leave any preconceived thoughts about what they are going to see at the door. The Waste Land featured twenty artists. It was a no-holds-barred, in your face side-show. Stirrings Still, the title taken from a contemplative Beckett essay, with forty artists, steped back a little—if only for a moment—from The Waste Land’s ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ display to allow the viewers to catch their breath.

The Waste Land

The Waste Land, the inaugural exhibition of the Project Birch Forest series, took its title from T. S. Eliot’s kaleidoscopic, ground-breaking poem, and—thanks to the unerring eye of curator Raul Zamudio who peopled the exhibition with some two dozen powerful works of art—the exhibition more than fulfilled Eliot’s poetic promise to “show you fear in a handful of dust.” In the ante-chamber, which set the stage of what’s to follow once reaching Stepanova’s primeval arbor, the work of several artists demanded close attention; meaning more than just a superficial gaze was required to get the full blast before the obvious hits you.  Adroit at combining elements of pop art, abstraction, expressionism, digital, photo-realism, along with touches of the surreal in her work, Tatyana Stepanova has an uncanny ability to create mood-evoking paintings that pull one’s eye and mind into her canvases. Another of the artist’s trademarks is ambiguity, meaning, that while her visuals might be simple to read, the many moods that they trigger, the number of ideas embedded in her work—not to mention a myriad of possible narratives, all open to interpretation—are anything but.

In Top 10 Billionaires (2008-2009), right, London-based artist, Gordon Cheung, using photos taken from Forbes Magazine, garishly re-presented front page super elites, some with more wealth than a small country, in slick, psychedelically painted hues. Of course, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet presented as pseudo-religious Sun-Gods melting under their own radiance, were at the top of Cheung’s list.

Taking up the entire top half of one of the front gallery’s four walls are two highly resonant diptychs, Purple Ocean (2006), and Lament (2010), painted by Russian born, Bridgeport, Connecticut based artist Tatyana Stepanova. Adroit at combining elements of pop art, abstraction, expressionism, digital, photo-realism, along with touches of the surreal in her work, Stepanova has an uncanny ability to create mood-evoking paintings that pull one’s eye and mind into her canvases. Another of the artist’s trademarks is the ambiguity —meaning, that while her visuals might be simple to read, the many moods that they trigger, the number of ideas embedded in her work, not to mention a myriad of possible narratives – all open to interpretation – are anything but.

In the right-sided panel of the Purple Ocean, a large yellow moon hangs ominously over a purple-painted sea. The artist could be drawing our attention to the polluted waters of the world. Or maybe just pointing out that life is a mystery, a deep one at that. In the left-sided panel, sketchily painted in gray, we see the contours of woman’s face. Her mouth is open, head flung back. Is she in agony or ecstasy? Is she alive or dead? Perhaps the artist, whose diptychs have a strong story-telling quality—the panels can be read as talking to each other—informing us that the woman has drowned in the adjacent purple sea panel.

In Lament (see opening image, above), Stepanova positions the solitary figure of a woman next to a panel with three women in motion. Is the solitary figure a dancer, a high fashion model? Is the tattered dress that she is wearing hinting at violence? Or is she wearing one of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s wild creations? And what about the three women who appear to be singing and dancing? Are they celebrating some holiday or are they part of a funeral procession? Again, the artist, exploring the dualities of life, leaves us to our own devices to solve the mystery of what we are observing.

The work of Mexican artists Gabriel de la Mora and Miguel Rodriquez Sepulveda, and New York-based artist Richard Humann, were eye-fooling fusions of method, material, and idea. De La Mora’s two delicate line drawings, one of skulls, the other a quirky, somewhat humorous, skeletal self-portrait of the artist as a chicken (see left) , at first glance look like finely executed ink or pencil drawings but turn out to be—adding a touch of the macabre—drawings made with human hair taken from artist as well as members of his family. Equally intriguing, and as subtly deceptive, were Miguel Rodriguez’s Sepúlveda’s beautifully crafted landscapes from his 2008 series The Irresistible Persistence of Memory. Using water mixed with the human ashes of a woman who was born and died in Columbia, the artist draws comparison between the ‘forced’ disappearances of over 25,000 Columbians by paramilitary groups, leftist guerillas, criminal gangs and drug cartels in the last twenty years, to the disappearance of Columbia’s rural landscape.

Right: Miguel Rodriquez Sepulveda, Untitled (Columbian Landscape), 2008, 9 ½ x 7 /14”, uses water mixed with ashes of woman killed in Columbian wars, on cotton paper.

Richard Humann’s miniature bass wood sculptures from his series You Must Be This Tall, a subtle blend of fun-filled flights of fancy with harrowing hard boiled facts, made me think of The Joker, Batman’s nemesis, behind whose duplicitous smile lurks a vicious and calculating killer. Here, Humann using typical crowd-pleasing entertainments like the shooting gallery, dunking the clown, and testing your strength with a hammer, found in amusement parks and carnivals the world over, turns our mind towards the sinister by ending each of his small, intricately constructed side-show entertainments with the possibility of somebody’s death. Dunk The Clown (2008) ends by hanging. In Test Your Strength (2008), left, the guillotine takes your head. Such morally questionable amusements—the dark side of fun—replete with historical execution devices, is not too far adrift from watching the Gulf War being fought on CNN, or for that matter, the real life executions that surface every once in a while on TV and on the Internet.

Entering the main gallery at White Box, one’s mood is automatically recalibrated by low lights, a forest of foreboding trees, and a scattering of undecipherable sounds. A dozen of Providence, Rhode Island-based artist China Blue’s twinkling blue fireflies in jars, strategically placed throughout the forest-filled exhibition immediately informs the viewer, as Dorothy says in the Wizard of Oz, that we are no longer in Kansas, but in an eerie world of ominous-looking trees where just about anything that can be thought, can, and usually does, happen. There are, though, a few moments of mental rest, meaning that a particular work, though perhaps inwardly threatening, is outwardly light on the visually horrific. Venezuelan born, Barcelona-based artist Ruben Verdu’s designer LV Trash Bag (2009) discretely placed on the floor, though it could be hiding a bomb, was but one of the more formidable examples. In first spotting the bag high fashion comes to mind, this immediately followed by the saying: If you see something, say something, a terrorist warning prominently posted on every New York City subway and bus.

Above right: China Blue, Fire Fly Jar, 3 ¾ x 4 ¾” pager motor, guitar strings, Water bottle, wings, and F-LED.

Yearly Dosage (2010), below left, an installation by The Social Art Collective, a group of New York City-based public health workers, artists and writers, exposed the nature of drug packaging, branding, and the pervasiveness of drug addiction, by affixing a year’s worth of used heroin glassine bags—365 collected from the streets of various New York City neighborhoods—onto the gallery wall in grid-like fashion. These images, taken from popular culture, are advertorial-designed heroin bags, many embellished with playful symbols, decorative colors, and glamorously seductive names like ‘Last Temptation,” “Kicking Ass, “Lady Gaga.” Some bags are even stamped with Barack Obama’s silhouette, making it clear that where competition abounds, no section of commerce is left untouched. Such visually fetishistic romanticizing normalizes the use of heroin in a casual way, one of the many points that The Social Art Collective is stressing.

Particularly intriguing is Venezuela-born, Amsterdam, Madrid-based, Abdul Vas’s menacing C-Print Capeman (2008), right, a photograph of one of his leather-jacketed friends on which he has painted the head of a chicken. In many of his paintings, drawings, and wall murals, Vas presents the chicken as the exterminator of the human race, the irony being that in actuality it is the chicken, the icon of the kitchen, who is the victim of food stuff genocide. Addressing politics, Vas’ chicken-headed figures, often seen with references to the National Rifle Association, American baseball teams, and SUVs, are stand-ins for the masculine element of the American cowboy culture. Executioner and victim, his chickens, just like the human race, use force, exercise hate, and perpetrate violence that both frightens and charms.

For those who still shudder at the very mention of Hitler and the evil that followed in his wake, Lithuanian, Paris-based artists Svai and Paul Stanikas’s large tabloid-like poster, Magda Goebbels Queen of the Bones (2009)  left, image detail, is a chilling reminder, more timely than ever, of one man’s mesmerizing power to lead an entire nation to death and destruction. It is also the story of Magda Goebbels,the wife of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister. Here, among images of bones and bodies and related documentation, laid out in pristine white, are her six children that she murdered by poison before she and her husband committed suicide outside of Hitler’s bunker. Her unrepentant last words, written to her son from her first marriage, “Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvelous that I have known in my life. The world that comes after the Führer and National Socialism is not any longer worth living in and therefore I took the children with me, for they are too good for the life that would follow.”

Coming upon Dutch born, New York and Netherland based artist Liselot van der Heijden’s powerful 3-minute looped video, Feast. Homage a Marcel Broodthaers (2004), right, solved the mystery of the scattering of undecipherable sounds that permeated the gallery’s forest. Looking down from their high perch on the wall—filmed frighteningly close up at that—is a clutch of vultures, with terrifying bird-screams, ferociously fighting over a piece of meat. Flashing across the screen, just as we are trying to figure out what it is that we are looking at—all we glean from sight and sound is murderously horrific—are the words,” This is not political” followed a few seconds later by, “This has nothing to do with oil.” Our first reaction is to laugh, albeit knowingly. Then reality sets in. The warring vultures may be referring to the Middle East oil saga—a newbie in the scheme of things—but the larger message here is the ever-present violent nature of mankind.

Directly across the gallery is Zhang Huan, Shanghai/New York City-based artist’s video Pear Blossom Grove (2003) left. Filmed in a dog meat processing facility in the mountains of China’s Shandong Province, especially known for its white blossom flowering pear groves, it is the most unsettling work on view. The artist focused on the primitive factory’s meat processing procedure, where the dogs are wet down by a hose, then murdered by an electrified pole wielded by a worker. Most horrifying is the look in all of dogs’ eyes—those that are caged, as well as those about to be killed. The fear in their eyes, not unlike the fear in the eyes of Warsaw Ghetto and World War II concentration camp victims, and prisoners of war targeted for execution, is overwhelmingly painful to watch. Seeing the dogs—on the way to being turned into food—knowing that they are going to their death and that nothing can save them, hits close to home. It is painful just thinking about such slaughter. The same probably can be said about the meat processing factories that slaughter millions of cows, and lambs the world over. Of course these practices, taken to heart by many vegetarians, are well-hidden from the meat-eating masses.

Occupying a small walled off space at the back of the gallery—seemingly an exhibition unto itself—were two intricate installations, each transmitting its message in a different manner and speed, by Polish born, New York City-based artist Wojtek Ulrich. The simpler of the two, Concentration Garden (2003-2004), featured the ubiquitous wire fence, the type used to protect people and property, as well as hold prisoners in jails, and in displacement and detention camps around the world. By adding colorfully lit, iridescent neon wires to the dull gray chain link fence, the installation stoped us in our tracks. One part of our brain, triggered by the seductive blue waves of light, wants to jump Ulrich’s fence and party, the other more cautious part, knowing full-well the ugly history electrified fences, remains at arm’s length.

Right: Wojtek Ulrich, Tower of Babel (48 Channel Cross) 2004, 48 LED monitors, DVD players, satellite dish with live video feed.

Wojtek’s Tower of Babel, (2004) , monolithic electronic sculpture shaped in the form of the ubiquitous religious cross, was by far the most intricately constructed work of art on view. It was composed of 48 small LED monitors, DVD players, and a satellite dish that picked up countless television stations from around the world, all of which served to overwhelm the gallery viewer in a great many languages and subjects, by a dizzying cacophony of banal and totally useless audio visuals from around the world, emanating from the sculpture’s many screens. In cross breeding the addictive nature of the television with the history laden Christian cross, the artist is pointing out that TV—and by extrapolation, the computer screen and other social electronic devices—is the new church on the block, one that has us looking to a technology based “ higher power,” for our next ‘Breaking News’ fix.

Situated in the basement of White Box—think of the space as a decompression chamber to bring an over-stimulated brain to a more even keel, allowing a switch of gears from the most extreme downsides of life to the beauty of the ethereal, and sublime—was Exiles of a Shattered Star (2006), left, Canadian born, UK-based, Kelly Richardson’s 30 minute video. It was one of a handful of works in The Waste Land that appeared to be courting multiple interpretations. The piece opened on a peaceful lake, nestled among a range low lying mountains, not unlike a pastoral scene from a Hallmark greeting card. Suddenly, a flurry of brightly burning debris, shaped like small comets with flaming tails, starts falling from the sky. What are we to make of it? Are these meteors? Is this an invasion of aliens from another planet, angels descending from heaven, or a shattered star, as the title implies? Whatever conclusion you come to, the video’s placement at the end of the exhibition is a canny, not to mention sophisticated, curatorial touch, allowing the viewer the possibility of leaving the forest with a bit of beauty and a smidgen of hope.

Stirrings Still

While Raul Zamudio’s curatorial leanings in The Waste Land was heavy with its “in your face” and “take no prisoners” approach, Stirrings Still curator Juan Puntes’ hand took a more subtle and philosophical approach, one that ponders the question,as White Box’s press release states, “…whether we have arrived or not at a moment in time where we need to thoroughly question the social and cultural value of our incessantly increasing production.” To this end, Puntes, with the help of curatorial collaborators Isaac Aden, Robin Wallis Atkinson, and Andrea Monti, whose video program was a small exhibition itself, had assembled the work of forty international artists whose work, some influenced by Stirrings Still,  Beckett’s gentle, contemplative essay, explored many of the same issues as The Waste Land artists, albeit in a considerably tamer way.

Stirrings Still began at the entrance to White Box gallery with This Skin (2010), far right, Canadian born, New York City-based artist Carl Skelton’s projected moving word puzzle which took up the entire street front window of the gallery. Using the word ‘skin’ along with other four letter words taken from the King James Old Testament—all electronically displayed in continually changing stacked pairs—Skelton’s window display aped the stop and go, and sudden twists and turns, of Beckett’s complex writing style, found in his essay Stirrings Still. Directly to the right, on the outside wall facing the gallery entrance, was Grace Kim’s Threshold of Nothingness (2010), above, near right, a poetic series of short videos featuring anonymous people, close up and at a distance, in-focus and out, alone or mated, as they talk, walk, stop and look, come and go. A sense of sadness invaded our senses as we watched each passerby, seemingly isolated and on automatic pilot, executing their daily routine.

Again, welcoming us into the first room of the exhibition, the so-called ante-chamber, as she did in the The Waste Land, were two stunning Tatyana Stepanova works – Metamorphosis 2 (2010), below left, a single-figured painting, and Dream (2006), a diptych, replete with figures of two women, and an aerial view of a seashore. In the two-paneled Dream, shown first at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2006, the artist induces a feeling of weightlessness to our viewing experience by joining a lighter than air black and white close-up painting of two female faces—with their eyes closed and mouths partially open—to a tranquil blue sea. It could be dreaming, or like mermaids, resting at the bottom of the sea. In Metamorphosis, a ballet dancer and a graffiti artist are busy at work. The dancer, suspended in mid air like a spider, is portrayed in black and white, while the young man, in full color, is seen busily painting images onto a green wall. Both are oblivious to each other. Or are they? The picture, hung upside down, subverts our normal way of viewing as well as thinking. There is a tension between the figures. But, whatever is happening between them, if anything, is indeterminate.

Occupying the entire left wall of the chamber, all eight-by-sixteen feet, was Joel Simpson’s mural-sized photograph, Ramaria, Martha’s Vineyard (2005-2011), below right, from his series Empire of Illusion, named after Chris Hedges’s 2009 book, describing the polarities of the two societies that we live in, one based in reality, the other rooted in fantasy. Echoing the same sentiment that things are not always as they appear, were Simpson’s beautifully-blooming vines—in reality a fast-growing fungus which Simpson likens to the overgrowth and overextension of the U.S. Empire, branching out uncontrollably, while wreaking havoc around the world and in our economy,here at home. In Command Center, another Simpson photograph—this one placed in an ornate fake gold frame in the basement bathroom—the artist uses the image of the common celery root to portray the grotesque, intricately-connected growth of our military-industrial complex.

New York City based artist/architect Allan Wexler’s digitally-derived painting Shadow-Table (2009), below left, from his series On the Art of Building in Ten Books, engages similar eye-to-mind-challenging ideas, which just might explain why Puntes placed Wexler’s painting smack dab in the middle of Simpson’s mural. Wexler, using the same techniques with paper that a furniture builder uses on wood – gluing, polyurethane sanding, waxing and buffing, has painstakingly constructed, layer by layer, a miniature image of a table, complete with a competing shadow leading us to question whether or not this solid, simple generic table projects the shadow of itself, or does the shadow project the table. Even more provocative is the question, what is more real the table or the shadow? The obvious answer might be that they are equal, but opposite.

In his video, Money (filmed 2006, edited 2008), below right, Finland-born and based artist Jaakko Heikkilä, known for his videos of minorities in small communities, links an off-the-cuff comment made by an elderly, long-time Harlem resident with the world-weary facial image of celebrated drummer Dennis Davis – during one of Davis’ gigs at St Nick’s Pub in Harlem. One moment we are watching a jazzy, upbeat performance, the next we hear the elder’s voice, timed to the regimented beat of Davis’ drums, announce “It’s all about money, money, money, if you do not have money you ain’t nothing.” Repeated over and over again, what started out as a musical reverie became a soulful confession, as well as a damning mantra for the poor, unemployed, and unemployable.

Just as Richard Humann’s smaller constructions of amusement park rides, which he turned into devices of torture and capital punishment in The Wasteland, his, Wave Swinger (2008)—the largest and most provocative bass wood sculpture in his series, You Must Be This Tall—combines the ideas of public spectacle and private experience (left). Using the basic shape and form of the ride Wave Swinger (also known as the Chair-O-Plane) the artist replaced the chairs that spin around with the Roman crucifixion device, the cross. Like all of the works in Humann’s series, his monotone natural treatment of the wood has a neutralizing effect that hides the fact, at least initially, that what we are looking at is an instrument of force and repression, in this instance the iconic Christian cross. The artist seems to be saying that the church is taking us for a ride. The question of whether this ride is a good thing or bad, is left up to the individual.

Lit by a small spotlight, giving it the look of a religious work of art, was Footstep (the first), Mexico-based Rodrigo Imaz’s 2010 roughly-hewn clay sculpture of astronaut Neil Armstrong, complete with of his footprint imbedded at the base of the work (right). At first glance, this iconic image that has been embedded in our consciousness, as well as every school book, for the past forty plus years, appears be celebrating man’s first step on the moon. On closer examination, there we see the totemic mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb hovering above his head, an American flag in his hand waiting to be planted, and hundreds of pennies, which from afar looked like dirt, surrounding his feet. The artist seems to be saying that this “one step for mankind” in reality was the United States signaling to the world that it is all-powerful. We have the money, the will, and the power to conquer any territory.

Canadian-based, multimedia artist Eldon Garnet, a thinking man’s artist—meaning that there is a lot more than meets the eye—is represented by two ten foot long sculpted stainless steel works from his Small Sculpture Statements series, and a light jet print from his Dominion series from 2009. The two sculptures, A Brilliant Blast of Darkness (2006), and Present But Out Of Focus (2004), both poetically titled, capture the artist’s existential thoughts about the transitory nature of life. In his photograph Dominion (2009), far left, an ordinary man in a suit, with hands clasped, is seen quietly sitting on a park bench. It would be an everyday scene except that the man is totally surrounded by plastic orange fencing, the type that is used to keep people from entering the space. Totally hemmed in, literally and figuratively, he has nowhere to go. Circumstances, social, political, and economic, if you care to follow any one of those jail sentences, are keeping him in place. Complimenting Garnet’s sculptures, is Texas-born, New York-based artist, Ray Kelly’s metal rebar sculpture, Head on Hands (2010), near left, which echoes, in metal script, heads on hands, words taken from Beckett’s essay.

Ukraine-born, New York City based, Anton Kandinsky is known for his ironic poster-like paintings. Be they portraits of celebrities, political figures, or even still life—actually there is no subject that the artist doesn’t paint or for that matter photograph—most every work is infused with humor and themes of political corruption. In his painting, The Shadow of Melamid (2008), right, inspired by an article in the New York Times about the upcoming United Russia party election, Kandinsky tackles the popularity of Putin by recreating a winter street scene complete with an enormous pre-election Putin campaign poster, the type that flooded the city of Moscow. By adding his friend Alex Melamid’s shadow to the scene, Kandinsky references the early 70s Sots-art movement, which effectively used the social realist style stereotypes and myths to counter Soviet rhetoric. The painting makes clear that the movement Melamid and artist Vitaly Komar gave name to in 1972, is now nothing more than a shadow dwarfed by Russia’s current Putin-dominated political system.

Moving away from the political, we find ourselves immersed in Gosha’s Tales, an animated film and painting collaboration between Russian based filmmaker Irina Margolina and her artist-son Gosha Likhovetsky. Using ten years of Likhovetsky’s paintings, the basis for Margolina’s ceiling-viewed animations, Gosha’s Tales with music by the Russian singer and musician Yakov Yavno, is one of the few stops during this exhibition where enchantment holds sway. Though both artists have their own careers in Moscow – Margolina is an internationally known film animator and the director of Studio M.I.R in Moscow, and Likhovetsky an artist and a stage designer at Sphera Theatre – pooling their talents in this collaboration, they created what is essentially a Likhovetsky retrospective set to music.

No doubt the world of animation has influenced both subject and the naïve style of Likhovesky’s paintings, as a childlike innocence informs the mechanics of his drawings and paintings. “I depict the world as I see it. Mine is curious, cheerful, and mostly kind. I like to see people smile and always be in a good mood. My flowers are like colors themselves, every bouquet is a painting,” the artist informed me. True to his word, each of the artist’s six delicately painted gouaches, all with storybook titles like Rabbit called Tolik (2001), above left, Girl with a Mouse (2003), and Parrot (2001), are filled with the purity, joy and optimism, coming as naturally to Likhovetsky as they do to children.

The work of caraballo-farman, a two-person team composed of Iranian born, Montreal-based, Abou Farman and Argentina born, San Juan, Puerto Rico-based Leonor Caraballo, features two types of public activity, a peaceful protest and a suburban entertainment arcade, the type that caters to families looking for fast-paced, unique attractions. In their video, Contours of Staying (2004), members of Falun Gong are peacefully protesting some undefined cause in front of the Chinese consulate in New York City. We watch the wind and snow-battered faces of the protestors, whose central tenets are truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, have been banned in China where the movement originated. As they face yet another travail, this one is brought to them by nature. Also on view is a fluorescent-colored photograph entitled, No Exit from the duo’s Black Light series (2008-2009), right. Taken in low light at a laser tag and mini golf arena, the otherworldly photo, an actual door with the directional words ‘No Exit’ written on it, conjures up many thoughts and situations, one being Jean Genet’s play of the same name.

In his jet prints, New Orleans based artist Stephen Collier, uses Silly String, a children’s toy of flexible, brightly-colored, plastic string propelled as a stream from an aerosol can, to replace what would be if left untouched—the individual’s face. His intent is to examine how the material affects ones identity. In Black Hoodie (left) and Pledge Your Allegiance (2006), the ‘would-be faces’ of two individuals, one wearing a leather jacket, the other a hooded sweatshirt, is both funny and threatening. The funny ‘ha ha’ is in recognizing the hairy-looking silly string hanging from where the face should be. Not knowing what lives behind the silly string or who you are dealing with—is this a real person or a sculpture—adds an ominous twists to each portrait.

At first glance, Brooklyn, NY sculptor David Opdyke’s painted plastic, wood, and foam maquettes appear to be nothing more than highly accomplished architectural renderings. On closer examination, then, the artist’s take on life that nothing is exactly as it seems shows its resonate hand. In Memorial (2008), a barn-like, gray house rests on a pedestal attached to the wall. With light coming through the upper floor windows one is compelled to examine the house’s interior. Much to our surprise, a large bald eagle—to many symbol of U.S .imperialism—is seen getting ready to embark on yet another venture.

Turning to landscape, Opdyke’s The Public Good (2007), right, offers us an idyllic, tree-lined park in miniature. In the middle of the park, towering over the trees is a tall, thin monument composed of dozens of vertically-stacked desks, each with a vase of flowers resting on its surface. A solitary man is seen contemplating this strange configuration. What he is thinking, and what the artist is saying, is open to a myriad of interpretations, from the man’s own past life of sitting behind a desk for forty years to the various bureaucracies responsible for erecting countless monuments whose very purpose and meaning have long been lost to the viewing public.

Widely known for his staged, videotaped public demonstrations, complete with banners, badges, flags, and vans painted with compelling logos critically examining such far-flung subjects as the influence of the media and the toxic additives that pervade toys and foods, is Trento, Italy-based Stefano Cagol. Here Trento, reveals his elegant and quiet side. In REM (2003), left, a black and white video, with literary nods to Kafka and Beckett, the artist focuses his lens on a single stag beetle lying on its back. In a slow motion that visually brings to mind any number of Beckett’s plays, we watch, as well as identify with, the poor insect helplessly flaying it legs as it tries to right itself. At one point, then, emerging from its body, a second beetle appears. Now we have two beetles faced with the possibility of their very mortality.

In Book of Life (2004), right, New York/Finland based artist Osmo Rauhala’s compelling video letters from the alphabet come at us like meteors raining down from heaven. These pulsating images call to mind visions of the Milky Way, perhaps even human cells observed under a microscope. However, and I did have to inquire of him, it is the story of DNA, the various amino acids which constitute the heredity material in humans, thus explaining the mystery of the letters A, T, G, C, which fly about beautifully in the video. They are the chemical bases in which the information in DNA code is stored. In addition to having a studio in New York, Rauhala runs a farm in Finland that specializes in organic production, explaining his interest in genetics. “Now, for the first time in history,” he related in a recent email, “we have built enough nuclear waste and weapons to destroy this code. We have spread billions of tons of chemicals through farming and food industry to ourselves and our surroundings…without knowing the long term effects of all this.”

Korean based artist Boyun Jang deals with the passage of time, memory, and real life experience—both her own and that of an unknown man whose 1968, 35 mm slides she found in an abandoned house. Calling the unknown man ‘K’, and using his detailed notes written on the sides of each slide, Jang, visited the same cities, with camera in hand, that K had visited forty years earlier. Playing with visual history on her computer, the artist subtracted the images of K and his friends from his photographs, adding them into her own. In Four Days and Four Nights – a series of letters not on view here – to further immerse her in this project, the artist proceeded to describe her own experiences from K’s perspective by setting herself up as ‘K’ and writing letters to herself. In two photographs on view, 1968, Summer at the Beach, and The Deads, left (both from 2009), she positions K and his friends, incongruously dressed in business attire, on a sandy beach. By photographically merging K’s experiences with her own, the artists links her present to K’s past, by deliberating collapsing the years that separate them.

Lumber (2010), right, New York City-based artists Mary Mattingly’s and Rosemarie Padovano’s inventive video collaboration was one of the more playful works on view. Adding to video’s fun and boosting its potency is the fact that the video, which starts in a small forest and ends at a lake, is hidden among Stirrings Still’s very own forest of tree tubes. So what we get is a forest within a forest. Filmed in Maine by artists Claudia Salamanca and Scott Wiener, Lumber lets us follow, visually and audibly, the shenanigans of Mattingly and Padovano, who both—after having turned themselves into trees by strapping branches to their arms and crawling into a brown, 12 foot, fabric covered tube—proceed to roll through a deciduous forest, down a giant hill into a cow pasture, across a highway and several fields. In the process, before arriving lakeside, the tubes break apart. With legs and arms exposed, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, they begin to ponder this new horizon line.

Stirrings Still Video Program

The only place to sit down and rest our weary legs, a respite from our forest wanderings, was in a small darkened room cum theatre at the back of the gallery. With some twenty seats facing a large screen, viewers were treated by curator Andrea Monti to a 70 minute, continuously running video program, featuring the work of 12 American and European video artists, who all, on some level—structurally, aesthetically, metaphorically or emotionally—attempt to speak to Stirrings Still, Samuel Beckett’s last work.

In Adrift (2010), left, Elle Burchill’s (U.S.) 5 minute video, a group of sightseers are canoeing in New York City’s East River. In the background of this scenario are rapidly flickering images of New York City’s ubiquitous skyscrapers, the most prominent being the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. Back in the artist’s studio, a “happy computer accident” during the process of editing the footage, offered a totally unexpected video experience— jump cuts, slips, and fadeouts – that Burchill turned into a collaborative electronic work, between the artist and her tools. The end product is a kinetic video that literally and figuratively reflects on the passage of time, the temporary nature of power, and the limits of control.

Tim Geraghty’s (U.S.) Wolves (2010, 10 min), right, is composed entirely from ‘corrupt’ media files taken from footage of a television documentary on wolves. in what turned out as an informative documentary with shots of wolves, elks, and cows, a rotting carcass, and men. Using alternating video clips with images of men and animals, in a horizontal, split screen fashion, Geraghty turns Wolves into a harrowing dance between predator and prey. Wolves are hunting for food; elks trying to save themselves from the wolves; and the men, some with cameras, others guns, are hell-bent on protecting their chattel. In the background, TV (or is it radio?) sound bites such as “killed while alive,” “he controls his time very well,” “everybody should have basic security,” and “backroom deals behind closed doors,” all but trumpet the cruelty of nature, as well as man’s inhumanity to animals and man alike.

The sheer number of images – there must be over 1000 – and the dizzying speed at which they flash by on the screen in Jean-Gabriel Périot’s (Paris, France) 21.04.02 (2002-9 min) video, left, was simply electrifying. Using contemporary and historical images taken from TV, film, advertising, print media, books, library archives, and public and private photography collections, Périot re-presents the history of the world as a filmmatic collage. With tight, precise editing, he creates sequences of pictures, both beautiful and horrific, that become social critiques on labor conditions, war, persecution, revenge, violence against women, and just about any other political and social issues that come to mind. Images of bloody murder victims, bathing beauties, concentration camp atrocities, flowers, famous paintings, Hollywood actors, and campus protests, all interspersed, flash by at hundreds a minute. It is a visual trip not easily forgotten.

The late Brooklyn-born, London-based filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin’s entire oeuvre is an attempt to explore the issue of voyeurism and of the relationship with the Other. Because of Dwoskin’s lack of mobility—as a young boy the artist contracted polio leaving him disabled, which he used to his advantage—he turned to mastering the close-up, a technique that allows him to turn the raw flesh of humans into an abstract landscape. In Nightshoot 1 (2007, 10:30 min), right, part one of a trilogy, Dwoskin focuses his camera lingeringly on a prostitute that he is having sex with. We watch as she puts on her makeup, smokes what appears to be hashish, plays with her clitoris, and eventually straddles the photographer in an act of coitus. She is wearing a low-cut top with a jeweled cross dangling between her breast, and nothing below the waist. As the camera slowly pans across the landscape of the body, bit by bit, part by part, we join the voyeuristic cameraman drinking in the details of her body. It is left to us to piece together the story he is telling.

In Private Eye/l (2007), below left, Rick Niebe uses a short sequence taken from Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, with Humprey Bogart as noir detective, Phillip Marlowe, to create a mystery Beckett himself would have loved. Niebe isolates a moment from the movie where Marlowe leaves his house, then turns to see someone else leaving the house after him. He ducks behind the car secretly observing the figure that is following him. By brilliant use of editing techniques and manipulation of the frame ratio, Niebe creates a never ending circular narrative in which Philip Marlow (Bogart’s character) is being followed by Marlow, who in turn is followed by yet another Marlow. It is only at the end when Marlowe finally drives away in his car that we are set free from the infinitely expanding sequence of past events.

On the right wall of the staircase leading down to the lower level of the gallery was Anonymous, a photo montage exhibit organized by Tatyana Stepanova. Like curator Andea Monti’s video artists installation, Anonymous, which features 30 photographs of Bridgeport, Connecticut photographer Nathaniel Plotkin, is an exhibition within an exhibition. Self-defined as the founder of Accidentalism, Plotkin, bypassing complicated cameras “to capture the image faster” works solely with disposable cameras containing ordinary (Kodak) film. The photos on view—a wide range of subject matter as well as locations – documented unsuspecting people during the course of everyday life, urban scenes, and architectural fragments in Europe as well a the United States. One telling image catches three overweight men casually enjoying themselves at the Yankee Stadium. Another featured a graffiti-filled wall in Brighton England (right). Spray painted across the wall, a sentence which echoes this mini- exhibition’s title, are the words “The man with no name returns with the Lords.”

Also sharing the stairwell is Cat Woman, a 2010 self-portrait by St. Petersburg-born, Latvia-raised, Mülheim Germany-based artist, Natalia Ushakova (left). One of many self-portraits executed by the artist, Cat Woman, as Ushakova informs us “is a young woman in search of herself. She tries on several masks to see what happens and how they influence her life. One day when she will know who she is, she will not need any mask.”

As we left the stairs and enter the gallery’s lower level, the first work to challenge our senses was Argentina-born, Paris-based artist, Susana Sulic’s video, Brook Bag Da Da (2007-10), right. Flickering images and muffled sounds shoot out to us from an alcove placed small TV monitor. For a few seconds we are not sure what we are seeing or hearing. But soon enough, a distant skyline of an unidentified city, complete with twinkling lights, and sounds of planes streaking by, footsteps on gravel, muffled voices, and much static, a well-remembered picture of disaster, past and present, materializes. With the addition of aerial maps, billowing smoke, and the sound of bombs exploding taken from TV, Internet, and environmental recordings by the artist—all imitating television’s familiar style for delivering catastrophic information – we realize that Sulic, cleverly stringing together recognizable elements—created a frightening faux disaster, a metaphor, if you will, for the real thing. It could be 9/11, bombing of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, or any such tragedy. Take your pick. The artist seems to imply it’s all the same.

To the left of Sulic’s video was Santiago, Chile-born, Great Neck, New York-based artist, Pablo Jansana’s philosophically resonant painting, Can I follow an idea for the rest of my life? (2010), left . Situated alone on a small piece of wall, the work—reminiscent of Jasper Johns’s gridded number and alphabet paintings from the late `50s—speaks tellingly to the seriousness of Jansana’s, or any artist for that matter, ‘search for meaning.’ As a viewer, Jansana’s muscularly painted question, tinged with violence and a sexual edge, led me to question where my brain has been and its direction, and if we even have a choice in such things. Perhaps, the answer is yes, for regardless of variations, we are an idea, if not a self-fulfilling prophesy, one that seems to sing the same song over and over again.

Gracing two of the gallery’s downstairs walls was New York City-based artist Ali Hossaini’s and Alexandra Lerman’s, 2-channel video projection, Memory Begins (2010), right. The videos projected on adjacent walls, one flush, the other skewed as if falling forward, were filmed by the artists in the lushly landscaped gardens at Water Mill Center for the Arts, on Long Island, during the summer of 2008. Though no particular goal was set during filming Hossaini informed me that the footage became, like many passing summers, indelibly associated with his emotional state at the time: a sense of profound loss coupled with the excitement of change, growth and fresh adventure. Though the video is non-verbal, its enveloping, two-walled structure, coupled with the beauty of the landscape, conjures memories of our own summer scenes of yesteryear.

In The Hour of the Star (2010), below left, Mexico City/Tijuana-based artist Tania Candiani’s one-minute looped, black-and-white video, only the artist’s shoulders and hands are seen, as balloons humorously cover her face. She is pictured blowing up 19 balloons on which she has hand-sewn words—one on each latex balloon—taken from the opening lines of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s (1920-1977) book of the same name. The sentence reads, “Everything in the World began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.” The intent of her video which was derived from her series, Tales and Other Nightmares (2010) in which she appropriates first lines or paragraphs from novels by authors such as Camus, Kundra, and Duras, She creates a totally new narrative, offering “the viewer two different narratives, one in the form of a text, and the other (which goes in some of the pieces, in an opposite direction of the text) in the form of a photo images, a drawing or filmed scene.

Holding pride of place, in the middle of the floor, was Isaac Aden’s installation, Stirrings Still (2010), below right, arguably the most ocularly complex work in the exhibition, and the only work referring to Beckett’s essay by title. It is also the sole work that compeled you to look both up and down as you try to decipher what appears to be an act of magic. In reality the installation’s structure is simple—its four dimensional effects, less so. Affixed to the ceiling, in a black painted plywood box, is the word “still” spelled backwards in glowing white neon. Directly below is a black rubber tray of water that mirrors the word “Still” – no longer seen backwards of course – on its surface. Out of the viewer’s sight, on top of the box mounted to the ceiling, is a tray holding ice. As the ice melts, dripping water into the rubber pool, the reflected text, disturbed by the rippling water, changes back and forth, from readable to unreadable. The negative space between the neon text and the pool of water adds a third dimension, while the recurring droplets, occupying the space between the two objects, suggests a fourth.

Editor”s Note: For art to matter, it must speak to the issues of the day. For art to endure, it must effectively address the human condition. The editorial decision to feature a story about an exhibition that took place over two years ago is based on the perception that the assembled works on display in Project Birch Forest represented a cogent and well-organized statement about issues and themes with currency in the world, accomplished in artful, yet sensitive ways.

This is no accident.

Curator, Tatyana Stepanova, together with White Box Gallery, skillfully arranged a cacophony of individual artistic voices into a unified chorus, raising awareness about themes that should matter to us all. Using literary reference by T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett as a framework for the exhibition, Stepanova recognized the stridency with which these early-modern writers addressed the cogent themes of cultural survival and global strife plaguing the dawning years of the last century.

Dates have changed, but times have not. 

Writer, Edward Rubin characterized Project Birch Forest as “provocative” and “truth-telling.”  Exhibition visitors were greeted by a forest of PVC tubes, hung from the ceiling, and metaphorically serving as the obstacles we all must navigate in our search for genuine answers to today’s problems. Once this gauntlet was run, the work itself then sounded alarms, by spotlighting motifs that unremittingly echoed the great hoped-for belief in civilization’s ability to right itself—if only the message would be received.   

Project Birch Forest was, and is, an event for out times…and a clarion call for awareness andd action.

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

Visit New York City’s White Box Gallery for current and future exhibitions at: http://whiteboxnyc.org/