Zimoun, a sound and installation artist based in Switzerland, has a quite simple piece in the first gallery: “150 prepared dc-motors, filler wire 1.0 mm.’’ He has mounted the tiny motors side by side, and attached a wire to each. The motors spin, and the wires beneath them shimmy and slap against the wall. It sounds like a drenching rainstorm - a trigger for associations of threat and cozy shelter.
At 2:30 every afternoon, Jonathan Schipper’s gargantuan installation “Measuring Angst’’ kicks into gear. Spotlights flood an empty Corona bottle attached to a U-shaped armature mounted to runners along the ceiling. The bottle rotates through the air at the speed of a tortoise, appears to smash into the wall, and breaks into pieces. Then the scene rewinds: The shards fit back together - redemption! - as the bottle flies backward. It’s as if all this heavy machinery has enabled recovery from irreparable loss.
Like Schipper’s, Gregory Witt’s work focuses on small, throwaway moments - taping up a parcel, flipping a switch - and imbues them with new meaning. For “Light Switch,’’ he has mounted a video monitor in a plywood frame attached to gears. On the monitor, a machine turns a switch on and off. The frame tilts up and down, mimicking the motion and angle of the switch. All the extra apparatus is comical, but it reminds us of the pressure of the switch under a finger, and the moment the electric current connects.
The other works are less captivating. Meredith Pingree’s motion-activated pieces perhaps required more than one or two people in the gallery to set them substantially moving. Jasper Rigole’s “OUTNUMBERED, a brief history of imposture,’’ which at first presents itself as a documentary, borrows a Ken Burns device, as a camera pans an old photograph. Step behind the curtain, so to speak, and we see the camera and the photograph, and are told that the narration about each figure is complete fiction.
