Reviews

Topological Inventions
Suzanne Bybee

This is what the new type of house must look like: a warp in the interpersonal sphere by which relationships are ‘attracted.’ Such an attractive house would have to assemble these relationships,  process them in the form of information, store them and pass them on. A creative house as the nucleus of an interpersonal network. 

-Vilém Flusser, p. 83, With As Many Holes As a Swiss Cheese, The Shape of Things, A Philosophy of  Design, 1999 

The investigation of a specific site is a matter of extracting concepts out of existing sense-data through direct perceptions. Perception is prior to conception, when it comes to site selection or definition. One does not impose but rather exposes the site – be it interior or exterior. Interiors may be treated as exteriors or vice versa. The unknown areas of sites can best be explored by artists. 

-Robert Smithson, p. 96, A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not, published in Landscape Architecture, April  1968, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 1996 

Placemaking is a response to environments tangible and intangible, not confined to one expanse; ideas,  awakenings, and actions create place – with this in mind, performance artists are placemakers, creating topological rearrangements and inventing exuberant spaces yet to be imagined.  

As witnessed in Utah Sites: Performance Art in Utah Landscapes 2021, curated by Kristina Lenzi, fifteen artists guide us to accompany them into performance through a digital lens, where terrains reach out to memory and connect to the artist as a reciprocal conduit, both as a creator and a subject. In captured finite intervals, film enters the surroundings as an intermediary element paving the way for revisitations and multitudinous views, levels of space within a space to envision a present with a participatory eye.  This telematic point of reflection, a repeating calibration of durational staring, focusing, and watching is a  restorative moment at the intersection where play and space converge - in this physicality of shared time span and space, an accumulation of distinct images elevate familiar vistas and introduce unknown horizons. We are with the camera, we are with the artist as surveyor, merging into undulating interiors and exteriors, entering landscapes blooming with collected rooms.  

As seen in Alexandra Barbier’s 3 on 3rd, a blinking eye is a framed beacon directing viewers to the outer reaches of a staid and controlled tableau. Keeping a concentrated beat, the eye of the artist is in the corner of an interior while an open window permits the outside in – sounds chime and waft, access is granted to reflections caressing the pane and shadows flick across the sill; this layered opportunity traces the unseen while the stillness signals us to pause, anchoring awareness to support the construction. 

Configured by a fixed eye, we see across the submissions space/time adopting a focused response to the landscape, processing the identification of what something is and what it is becoming as depicted with or without a subject. Layers of communication and detail pass through these environments, real and imagined, the changing complexities of spaces altered by presence(s) absorbed into our perception,  harnessing different modes of concentration and discovery. As the body is summoned from the landscape, it takes on a variety of formats and incorporates new roles: we can make it out in the distance passing by us, or approaching, a hovering ethereal journey we follow and track.  

The film eye incorporates the audience and the artist’s view into one omnipresent feature. The beauty of this merging is illustrated in I Am Water, where the action of being lowered into or on top of a body of water binds the audience to the action of water as a great, meandering traveler. Winston Inoway intimates that to embark on this journey, we too, are the water with him – the transformation of being a  revelatory immersion.  

Mapping these experiences is to partake in a larger assemblage of landscape that envelopes the physicality of becoming – the type of process that encapsulates the awakening of dreamscapes constructed by those who would utilize risk and chance to explore realities that are not necessarily understood. The tools for accessing this illumination are a part of our lives to begin with, but through acts of endurance, fantastical vision, alterity, and projection, these artists open themselves as mediators of space without walls or boundaries, traveling with elemental knowledge to trust their own capacity for discovery, be it staring into the searing sun or opening the door to spirits of indeterminate echoes.  

Suzanne Bybee (1967, Anaheim, CA, US) is an artist and writer who relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah after residing in Washington, D.C. for many years. She received her Master of Fine Arts Painting from Claremont Graduate  University, Claremont, CA in 2000. She has shown primarily in Los Angeles, California, and Seattle, Washington;  more recently she has participated in group exhibitions in Salt Lake City, Utah. Currently, she is participating in collaborations and curatorial projects with other artists, writing and reviewing artists’ work, and creating art in the analog and digital realms.