Social Issues Fused With Technology
By PHYLLIS BRAFF
Published: March 23, 1997
Margot Lovejoy: Anamnesia
Art Gallery, Long Island University, Southampton. To March 30. 287-8427.
For more than a decade, Margot Lovejoy has been inventing powerful installation pieces by blending astute conceptual components with technologies like computerized, multi-layered slide projection and video. Her text and image choices address significant social issues, and usually contribute a useful perspective. The work has visual strength and is intellectually engaging at the same time.
The healing potential of anamnesia, signifying a recalling to memory, is the central thrust of this absorbing installation. AIDS, physical and psychological wounds and complex metaphorical relationsips between the human body and society's right to invade its privacy are all issues that are addressed through a mesmerizing assault of images and through a text that is projected in segments against water vapors intended to suggest the amorphous qualities of the emotions surrounding loss. Industrial beats and crescendos of rhythms in a sound track by Brooks Williams contribute to a feeling of crisis. Huge mylar prints on one wall further dramatize the feeling of crisis by featuring three enlarged, authoritative and confrontational figures seemingly ready to function as either jurors or operating room personnel.
Molecules, cells and capsules lend themselves well to the dazzling patterning schemes that form part of the installation's visual punch. Color, often delivered in shifting red or green veils, can form part of the sensuous message. Always different in scale and format, a broad range of other images are rapidly juxtaposed: test tubes, patients and hospitals, but also outdoor crowds, Venetian palaces and landmark buildings. This variety cleverly implies the universality of the theme, while structures like the Lincoln Memorial reinforce the healing intent of ''Anamnesia.''
Sequencing of closeups, schematizations and cropped bits of documentation emphasize how the artist can use and control timing adjustments to build effects and to purposely structure disorientation and reorientation. Most everything is fast-paced here in a presentation that broadens our ideas about suitable ways to represent reality.
Gayle Willson Gallery, 43 Job's Lane, Southampton. To April 7. 283-7430.
Merging recent developments in electronics and science with the methodologies of art is a hot and frequently exciting topic these days. This modestly scaled show, with work by three Long Island-based artists, offers examples of images either created or enhanced by new technologies.
Gentle, subtle and in many ways the richest work, the photographs by Jay Hoops seem to seek a mysterious quality and this gives a nice edge to most of her pieces. Her computer enhanced ''Blue Tree and Clouds'' invents a second spatial plane and changes landscape elements into shapes and marks that are more haunting than descriptive.
Divided units of color that merge in the viewer's eye, creating a vibrating resonance, give Gary Beeber's sea images a characteristic associated with Impressionism, although in this instance the facets result from a computer digitalizing process. Amorphous closeups of rocklike underwater masses are Mr. Beeber's strongest direction, for these all-over, flat surfaces are more in tune with the artifice of the medium.
Using a chromagenic process that allows arbitrary color to appear to be super-saturated, Tulla Booth transforms flowers into intense, bold forms. The best are assertive closeups that seem both real and unreal at the same time. In the high-impact ''Lotus Blossom Afloat,'' greatly magnified purple-pink anthers look like startlingly contemporary creations fashioned from some solid, reflective substance.
25th Open Competition
Firehouse Art Gallery, Nassau Community College, Garden City. To April 5. 572-7165.
When community-oriented open juried competitions achieve longevity, they frequently acquire a degree of status and respect. This 25th edition of a well-known Long Island show attracted a record number of entries from area artists. Two jurors, Harry Davies and Helen Harrison, made the final selections.
As might be expected, highlights emphasize originality. The most outstanding pieces range from uncanny interpretations of recognizeable imagery to subjective, textural abstractions to carefully organized compositions in both color and black and white photography.
Kathleen Lizzul strikes a particularly high note, playing nurturing against aggression in ''Urban Tribal Survivors,'' a shell-cradle holding tough-surfaced, embryo-like shapes suspended above an expanse of pointed metal screws. In Jennifer Shea's powerful, boldly askew portrait of a scantily clothed woman, armpits are the central focus and orientation is also challenged by dyed red hair disguising one eye.
Other edgy and successful approaches to reality include Marilyn Geiger's sensitive addressing of concentration camp issues in a booklike, mixed media assemblage and Kristine O'Malley's painting that hammers away at reversals of tradition by presenting an angel in earthly play and a baby floating in the role of an angel in a Renaissance annunciation scene. There are uneasy messages, too, in pieces by Amy Fox and Dorrit Title that make imaginative use of old photographs.
There is also considerable visual power and concentrated energy in Carroll Agoglia's three-unit monoprint and in Nonny Rosenman's textured collages.
Photography selections add to the show's strength. Muriel Gluck creates a rhythmic pattern of tones and curving shapes in a hat shop view, while Susan Samet achieves a powerful composition with architectural elements.
Other impressive examples by Richard J. Nowicki, Richard Calvo and Robert L. Harrison select elements from nature.
Photos: From left: detail from ''Anamnesia,'' multimedia installation by Margot Lovejoy; ''Roman Geometry'' by Susan Samet at Firehouse Gallery, and ''Blue Tree and Clouds'' by Jay Hoops at Gayle Willson Gallery in Southampton.