Steina Vasulka's installation video, Pryoglyphs, was taped at the foundry of Tom Joyce, a metalsmith with a bent toward alchemy, its manifestos for purification and transmutation.
Icelandic by birth, Steina explores that country's volcanic landscape,as "smiths and shamans come from the same nest," a nest of sparks from gaseous clouds spread over millennia, born of the human dream to transform ourselves into other forms.
In the gallery's darkened grotto a circle of shadows absorbs episodes of light projected onto four large freestanding translucent screens--images visible on both sides--, and a wall.
Crackling/booming/exploding, mixed down to two channels, two speakers, because of limited acoustical space, sounds retreat into caverns of ominous silence, where wood is crushed into long stringy veins, paper burns and macaberly twists, a hammer forces its way down through smoke-ladened air, "letterboxed" images spread over the screens as lava, distilling messages the earth began transmitting eons ago.
There are as many senses of time-flow, time-erupt, time-withdrawn as our eyes reflect and refract, the various sites stagger, misfire, laying waste to eardrums with the slow sonorous beats from centuries of liminal enterprises, entering icy streams in stereo, following visions to their phlogistic source, where all the somber intonations are lighted, then doused out.
Here we may meet the tiny figures, imps of crankum, tricksters who mimic our heated debates on ontology and epistemology, grinning at the occluded channels we carve through the liquid latitudes of our mind.
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On the evening of the opening, a group of friends were standing around talking. Woody Vasulka, Steina's husband and fellow Video Art pioneer, was bewailing how, especially in the U.S., real risk, putting one's life on the line, is not in the artist's studio anymore. Steina laughed, and said: "When I was born, the world came into being."
© 2003 - Joel Weishaus
Steina Vasulk and her husband Woody founded The Kitchen, in New York.