Front and Back Gallery

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Marman's rocks are absurd objects. She offers no particular key to their meaning per se; it is unnecessary, even undesirable. Rather, they ignite relationships which ultimately set up a situation. Their design as units without a set configuration mobilizes them, and together they signal or define zones of space as buoys or pylons might. Through their resulting relationships to one another, and to the particularities of each site as they're grouped and regrouped, the game becomes equally about the rocks and the animated expanses that stretch between them. The gallery becomes re-situated as some otherworldly geological site in which the viewer becomes something of an explorer.

The Back Gallery has been similarly transformed, as Lynne Marsh plays dress-up as an intergalactic super-heroine in her video projection Venus...I see blue. Geared up in goggles, gloves and boots, a cap with peaked ears, and a two-piece red get-up inspired by traditional Chinese dress, Marsh charges, leaps and karate-chops her way through the digitally simulated terrain of the planet Venus. Marsh has sampled and mixed footage of her character running and leaping in place into jerky, gravity-defying feats that allow her to remain suspended in air, kicking up her knickers. At one point her image multiplies into three, each pivoting and chopping the air in synch in a formation comically reminiscent of early morning TV aerobics classes.

With virtual fighting games, martial arts, and streetwear among her sources, Marsh creates a hyper-persona that is a composite jumble of stock female pop icons assimilated by her own body and identity. As a result, Marsh's Venus really straddles the gap between the 'real' and the 'affected' by articulating complexities of identity and persona as constructs. Although the appearance and actions of her heroine verge on the ridiculous, Marsh herself took karate lessons as a part of the research for this project, a skill which is now a part of her 'real' identity. And while she is depicted performing hyper-fabulous physical feats and tricks beyond human capability, she is also at times hyper-tired and hyper-breathless.

Like Haska, Marsh synthesizes a fictive environment from images sampled from 'real' photographic sources. Using footage borrowed from NASA space cameras, she rebuilds the blue mountains and rocky terrain of Venus as a backdrop for her fantasies. Marsh identifies her re-rendering of the planet as an uncolonized 'free zone,' a neutral ground in which liberating imaginative experience is possible.

Marsh projects a life-size environment where the figure's frontal positioning mirrors that of the viewer, and in turn implies a direct physiological and empathetic relationship between the two. This identification is enhanced by the link of Marsh's movements in the landscape to the format of virtual fighting games, and as viewers we find ourselves engaged in a similarly charged interface. Is Marsh's Venus an opponent?... an instructor?... a performer?... your doppelganger? All of these relationships are implied at once, and it is the ambiguity of the situation and the terrain that opens up that invites engagement in fantasy and role-play for the viewer as well as the artist.

And this effect is essentially the crux of each project in landescape; relationships or situations which span between concrete points or references; that is space. Whether in two or three-dimensions, literal or implied, each artist proposes an environment which escapes the singular perspective and flatness of a traditional landscape.

These places often straddle the notions of both 'here' and 'someplace else'. Haska and Marsh create pictorial landscapes that suggest other worlds through a confusion of references from our own. In Marman's case the 'landscape' is implied, and is beyond actual representation. They are situational or relational, and exist in the imagination or through physical experience. The new 'places' that open provide environments with the potentiality for imaginative speculation or projection of both artist and viewer.

None of these projects boast promise of transcendence or emancipation, but rather incite subtle shifts in perspective which allow for the playing out of fantasy or a momentary escape. The role of the interactive postmodern viewer is essential to each of these projects in order to effectively complete them. In making this jump, the viewer might split or leave him or herself momentarily, like the disorienting blip in consciousness that happens in the hitch of a hiccup or a sneeze.

Janis Demkiw