Dream on: Anderson Gallery explores human subconscious reflection

Mechelle Hankerson
Assistant Spectrum Editor

“The Nameless Hour,” the latest exhibit from the Anderson Gallery at 907½ W. Franklin St., features at least one piece visitors are encouraged to lie on. Pipliotti Rist, a Zurich- and Los Angeles-based artist, showcases the video and sound piece “Gravity Be My Friend” through sensuous natural imagery projected onto a ceiling-mounted screen – “best viewed,” according to an artist’s statement, “by reclining on the carpet sculpture below.”

The exhibition, which began on Nov. 19, takes up all three floors of the gallery as well as the carriage house next door to the gallery’s main building. Featuring sound, video and sculpture, “The Nameless Hour” seeks to explore dreaming as a complex phenomenon of human nature. The title comes from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who studied dreams, psychoanalysis, and imagination in his book “The Poetics of Reverie.”

In addition to the work of one VCU professor – Stephen Vitiello of the Department of Kinetic Imaging – the exhibition features the work of artists such as Stephen Cartwright and Janine Antoni.

Vitiello is a sound and media artist whose travels to the Australian outback are used in a pair of installations as artistic soundscapes.

Vitiello began work on his piece “The Sound of Red Earth” when an Australian patron asked him to create a piece on the Australian outback. Kaldor arranged for Vitiello to stay in a remote area of the Australian outback to record.

The “Red Earth” featured at Anderson Gallery, however, is actually only a piece of the larger whole: the original work took up three entire buildings.

One building coupled red earth spread on the ground with wildlife sounds; another, golden sand and water sounds; and another, black rock and sounds of wind.

“For Richmond, there was no way to transport 13 tons of red earth as I did in Australia,” Vitiello said. He decided to present the wildlife sound piece and the water piece and invite Jeremy Choate, a lighting designer from Houston, Texas, to create a lighting environment to reference the red earth and the blue of the water.

Vitiello began his sound art career out of his involvement with music.

“I grew up playing in bands and then started to do soundtracks for video artists and choreographers,” he said. “From there, I moved on to my own career as a sound artist. As a musician, I was also excited but not necessarily that skilled. With sound art, I’ve been able to find other ways that for me are more natural and intuitive, to record and process sounds.”

Cartwright, who presented a lecture last month for the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media, took a total of  12 years to complete “Fort Peck.” Every hour of every day, he marked his exact location using longitudinal measurements, and used the data to create a large-scale sculpture that physically manifests his movement through space as well as time.

Antoni, who has showed her work with VCUarts previously, joins a large film projection of a human eye to a real live wrecking ball.  As the wrecking ball lays still in the space, the eye blinks in tandem to a deafening audio track of the ball in action.

The exhibition also includes New York photographer Spencer Finch, who explores themes of “covering and uncovering, revealing and concealing” through a series of 60 photographs taken at one-minute intervals of fog moving over a densely wooded area.

The Anderson Gallery will display “The Nameless Hour” until Feb. 20, 2011. Admission, as usual, is free of charge.

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