Making sense of religious imagery and carved books at Buffalo Arts Studio
John Aasp is going to freak you out. His exhibition at Buffalo Arts Studio, “Eternal Now,” is one of the more bone-chilling in recent memory at any local gallery.
Aasp, who hails from Texas, presents a compelling series of short video loops containing religious subject matter that — for anyone who has seen “Rosemary’s Baby” or “The Exorcist” — has some fairly evident and unsettling overtones.
REVIEW
WHAT: John Aasp and Kevin Charles Kline
WHEN: Through March 7
WHERE: Buffalo Arts Studio, 2495 Main St.
TICKETS: Free
INFO: 833-4450 or www.buffaloartsstudio.org
As source material, Aasp has used short clips from silent films and television shows that on their own don’t imply malevolence. But together with Aasp’s visual tricks, in a darkened room with a single church pew for viewers to sit on, the five pieces in the show become beyond creepy.
On the back wall is a projection of an actor playing Jesus Christ. As he gesticulates, the image turns by degrees redder and redder, until it seems that he has been possessed by some evil force. A triptych of a young nun smiling deviously in an endless loop is projected on the adjacent wall, which in turn sits next to a segmented projection of the opening and closing of what looks to be a medieval torture device.
Aasp, an expert filmmaker, exploits the audience’s filmic vocabulary developed from watching countless horror films and thrillers. The short length of his loops makes the projections and video pieces into living portraits, existing in a spooky netherworld between painting and video.
Kevin Charles Kline
The world Kevin Charles Kline has created in his exhibition “DIG: excavations of information visualized” is one that not many could navigate and surely even fewer could survive. But it’s pretty beautiful.
Kline’s exhibition features a collection of books, the covers of which he has cut away with an X-acto knife. He continued to cut through the glued-together pages of the books, one by one, to create complex and multilayered images. Mostly educational in nature, the books have morphed under Kline’s hand from informational resources into often-disturbing abstract collages using only the materials printed on their pages.
Some work, and others don’t. A success is “Surgery Through the Ages,” a book Kline dissected to produce a thoroughly disturbing conglomeration of macabre images that inspire trepidation about what the book might have contained in its normal manifestation. Another weird highlight is Kline’s treatment of “The Illustrated Medical Encyclopedia (for Home Use).”
Kline also produced a series of maps, each constructed from parts of other maps to create fantasy continents in which India butts up against Michigan, Mexico against Chad, and so on.
One pictures wandering through a library of Kline’s massacred books and maps, searching for directions to Toronto or some information on killer whales, but encountering only fragments of visual information more likely to confuse than inform. And that seems to be part of the point.
By meticulously deconstructing books and engineering teratomatic continents from fragments of maps, Kline has perfected two separate and equally compelling styles of object-making. What those objects imply, beyond an apparent disdain for organized systems of literature and cartography, is less clear. Is it a plea for randomization in all things? A quasi-environmental statement on continental drift? A simple desire to organize the world according to visual information?
In any case, the intellectual impetus behind this particular body of work from Kline seems underdeveloped, visually fascinating though the individual pieces may be. It’s not exactly groundbreaking information, as the show’s accompanying essay states, that the world’s information is organized in misleading ways, or that the so-called wisdom in many books may very well be subjective. Kline’s exhibition makes that point exceedingly well, but it stops short of contemplating an alternative.
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