Barry Isenor

2 April 1998 - 9 May 1998
Opening Reception 2 April 1998 8pm

Project Room:

XXX Video, Spidersense #4

Mercer Union is pleased to present the fourth part in the Spidersense series of six exhibitions curated by board members Reid Diamond and Evelyn Von Michalofske. For each Spidersense, a visual artist and a concrete poet engage in spatial activities: one artist in the project room and one artist featured in the brochure.

XXX Video is one of those places in the city where people go to escape, to be lost for awhile. I remember going there that first afternoon, and not knowing how to read the place, just fumbling about. A mine shaft at the corner of a busy intersection. Enter through a turnstile into a bright room. Off that, a dark double liaded corridor butted another running in the opposite direction. Two corridors lined with alternating orange and yellow doors. Behing each door, identical compartments. Fold down benches on rusting hinges. The coat hooks, broken. Pay to view monitors hustle themselves as graffiti hustled others. The dominant smell of disinfectant linger, while time dissolves. Stained plexiglass windows connect adjacent compartments making them seem like double-sided stages. Not that everyone was a player there were plenty of flies about. It fascinated me that such a dirty hole in the wass could have such an elaborate protocol. Such an attraction.

-Barry Isenor

Peggy Lefler’s contribution to the fourth installment of visual poetry is a continuation of her visual language and is called entitled.