Aerial Photography Manipulated Into Art at Artcenter Mullin Gallery

Lia Halloran’s Double Horizon (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)

The Southern California vistas of Lia Halloran’s Double Horizon, a video installation now playing at the ArtCenter Mullin Gallery, turns the sky and earth below into a mirror, a kaleidoscope, and a blending of space into a geometry, sometimes all at once, at the video plays on three juxtaposed screens.

By Garrett Rowlan

It is aerial photography manipulated into art, and a treat for the armchair traveler.

Halloran is a licensed pilot, and is shown in the cockpit, flying the plane from which the cameras are mounted, making the film a kind of performance art, certainly of a breathtaking kind.

Watching it, one feels almost touched by the infinite, especially when the film’s titular shots inverts the sky to mirror and hover over the earth, using the slit-scan technique first made famous in the closing chapter of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  As ground and air come together in shots of her landing and taking off, one feels almost crushed by the sight and has the notion of what it would feel like to go through a wormhole.  Other times, the duplication of space makes the viewer feel small, as when the plane flies above the streets and suburbs of LA, both by day and night, yielding views of pure extension that can give a sensation of awe or even a faint feeling of horror.

Halloran’s odyssey is through So Cal. In some shots, we see landscapes blend and break apart, as if the geological processes below are shown in real time.  From time to time, we see the shadow of her plane projected on the ground, and in another shot a plane flies above, a white shape that seems on the verge of breaking the bonds of gravity.

The film is given a special panache by Allyson Newman’s accompanying score, at times propulsive and other times meditative.

The short film packs a lot of imagery in a dozen minutes or so of running time, and is well worth a view.

Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery
South Campus
1111 S. Arroyo Parkway
Pasadena, CA 91105
Hours
Tuesday–Sunday, 12–5 p.m.
Friday, 12–9 p.m.