Debris in a Bottle (Photo – Garrett Rowlan)
Upon entering the main of the three galleries that make up Our Abyssal Kin, an exhibit by Patty Chang and David Kelley, one gets the sense of immersion while high on a hill at The ArtCenter Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery.
By Garrett Rowlan
This immersion comes from the four screens on either wall, flashing images into the room’s darkness, and the speakers that layer the space with sound.
The skeletons of a boat, or perhaps some seagoing Leviathan, at the room’s center further enhance the impression.
The screens and speakers serve the film Stray Dog: Hydrophobia, a travelogue of sorts with ecological overtones, taking us to Jamaica and the surrounding ocean.
The four screens sometimes show different images, and sometimes display the same image twice, but in an out-of-sync progression, as if a thought or sentence was completed in another space. The film tells its story through montage and sound: the drumming of Jamaican musicians, the lapping of water on a shoreline.
The narrative moves beyond the shoreline, where washed-up debris is gathered in a plastic bag, carried out to sea, and then returned. We see the oxidized statue of a bewigged white man, a reminder of Jamaica’s colonial past; wild dogs with ribs showing; and we witness an international symposium on the dangers of ocean mining.
At one point, this gathering of scientists is, through photographic trickery, shown as taking place underwater, reminding us that much of our civilization comes from the ocean, and much of it may end up underwater too. The film doesn’t mention the melting polar ice caps, but that was the impression I got.
Or, as a singer/guru puts it, “We are created from the bottom of the ocean.”
The film ends with the march of Jamaican musicians through a street, and I couldn’t help but think of the conclusion of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.”
In the adjoining galleries are artifacts culled from the ocean—bottled wonders that seem like the wares of a demented apothecary.
Summarizing the film and the exhibit in its protean form is almost like trying to describe the movement of a blot of mercury, but with the exhibit running through January 26 next year, there is time.
An installation from ‘Our Abyssal Kin’ at ArtCenter (Photo – artcenter.edu)
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