Grounded?

Fighting off a sore throat, I ran through the Grounded and Grounded? exhibitions at Southern Exposure and Intersection for the Arts a few weeks ago. Though I would have liked to have seen more of the interactive works, which painted the town pink as well as other things, here’s what “took.”

Jessica Miller‘s time-lapse videos / stop motion animations. I liked this lego-glacial-pattern piece, and a mesmerizing video of pink tape filling up the negative shapes in the shadow of an iron gate. As the sun went down the florescent tape filled the frame. I liked Jessica’s earlier baroque-pop photo-installations, too — those were funny and pretty — but these new videos are rough around the edges, and it’s exciting to see what she’ll do next.

Zachary Royer Scholz‘ b/w print of a site-specific/found sculpture. I remember seeing this piece in 2006, and was happy to see it again. I think I like Zach’s work because it seems to involve so much chance and discovery, like Daniel Spoerri filtered through a more formal language.

This photo by Moshe Quinn (Thanks Kevin Chen!) of light rippling on a mundane stuccoed building with street-level newspaper boxes and a passerby = Genius.

While there were other interesting works, Christain Nold‘s Emotional Mapping poster, which was the result of a previous project at Southern Exposure, really caught my attention. First, the poster’s beautiful, in a micro-macro, Tufte/information-graphics-fan way. The content, consisting of mapping daily minutia, is personal, revealing and engaging. The map is a successful poster and also works as a book with multiple readings. But the project is interesting because the map is just a sliver — albeit a beautiful one — of a larger work that resides in the outside world.

Work about minutia is not new. I’ve made some, I’ve seen a lot. But Nold’s seems exceptional because it acts like a book, but you don’t have have to be bookish to find yourself immersed in the details.

If you’re like me, and are impressed by scary-smart programmer-artist-designers who make technology elegant for art applications, you’ll want to check out Nold’s site.