SANTA ANA, CA.- Jecca knows how to get past our defenses. In Cheryl Schriefer's exhibition design, Rob Mintz's paintings on paper provide Bauhaus-inspired counterpoint to Jecca's poetic critique of urban space.
Syncopated Situations
In Express Emotions, Jecca demonstrates that a face can have the power to convey intricate feelings without need for language. In a mad-cap dash through time and space, three years are compressed into five minutes.
Passenger Pigeon and Friends was conceived as an installation of shopping carts, vintage televisions, innumerable photographs, and the sound of birds, one of the rare creatures that share city space with humans. Hans Ulrich Obrist, a Swiss critic and curator, has written, "Birds are elements of ubiquity in the middle of things... oscillating between the actual and the virtual." In the video, the shopping carts acquire a certain pathos, contradictory ciphers of abundance and despair.
The artist thinks of REM Map as "a puzzle piece, reminiscent of hints we receive in dreams." In this hard-to-characterize work, the image of a sleeping man travels with motorists in the form of photos on small magnets. The intervention is so subtle as to be metaphysical, yet so convincingly documented one can easily imagine the vast tangle created by the peregrinations of the sleeping man. His fate is further complicated when museum goers abscond with his likeness, taking magnets home.
Aethernet superimposes images of Los Angeles with images of New York, and alternates between coasts with each breath, staging a collapse of the space between them. Describing the creation of Aethernet at the Experimental Television Center, Jecca writes of "intersecting cityscapes," in which "complex patterns of sound directly modulate the video's coloration, luminosity, and imagery."
For Towers of Light, Jecca video-taped a 9/11 public memorial, held at ground zero. Two searchlights aim into the night sky. Entering the searchlight's beam by chance, an airliner glimmers for a moment and disappears. The loop is only a few seconds long, an elegy for innocence.
In Collidoscope, Jecca blends the role of globe-trotting artist with saltimbanque. In front of the Louvre or the Guggenheim the weather is splendid, perfect for the documentation of a performance. Is the dancer dangling off the world, or holding it in place? In a handstand's strength and simplicity, endless joie de vivre!
In 2005 Jecca was invited to participate in a project for La Biennale di Venezia, a historically significant destination for contemporary artists. Poles Together/Poles Apart involved the embellishment of the upright poles in the canals used by gondoliers for mooring their iconic gondolas. It seems the artist's insouciant, submerged self-portrait, in a water-proof housing, is designed to survive the rising of Venice's notorious tides.
Rob Mintz's paintings on paper for Jecca Plus One are a species of circus poster, Bauhaus-inspired ideograms of subjectivity designed to augment the installation's uncanny atmosphere.
If the historic styles of abstraction have become diagrammatic ghosts, then he is high priest of their ancestor cult. In the post-modern predicament, not easily wished away, all images are juxtaposed, the notion of art's steady progress undermined. He conceives his pictures as cabinets of wonders, structured like computer windows, or comic strips. He believes there may exist a pre-cognitive domain of perception best expressed in formlessness.
Art's promesse du bonheur hints at a future free of oppression. In the unpredictable precincts of Jecca Plus One, new aesthetic paradigms complicate the discourse. Renegade interventions accelerate the transformations.
