Volume 14, Issue 45
Published February 28, 2007

Contractions of an Amorphous Solid
February 9th - March 3rd 2007
Exit (a gallery space)
2688 W.14th St. Cleveland Oh, 44113
330-321-8161

Planets collide - Bubblegum made sexy and cosmic at exit gallery.

Few advertising jingles have enjoyed the lifespan or near-universal recognition of the immortal Doublemint song: Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint gum! Probably a fine-arts application of this all-American canon was inevitable.

Or maybe that wasn't actually the inspiration, but the Doublemint ditty springs inevitably to mind at the show Contractions of an Amorphous Solid at exit (a gallery space). Since 2003 when a piece of chewing gum got stuck to their rear car window and they whipped out a digital camera, the Texas-based husband/wife team, Mary Magsamen and Stephan Hillerbrand, have made much of chewing gum, both in tandem and solo. Contractions is an (even) more astronomical/biological sequel to various works, beginning with sequences shown during a residency at the Woolworth Building in Manhattan in 2003, and continuing in the performance/video work "air-hunger," featured at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown in 2004.

The most engaging (and sometimes revolting) components of the previous series were color sequences and stills showing the pair in the act of exchanging large bubble-masses (for want of a better term). Sometimes they were shown facing each other with the bubbles conjoined, or mysteriously connecting with a sort of bubblegum umbilical cord. The associations these images provoke are complex and deep-seated — or not, as you please. A spirit of irony and general down-and-dirty, gooshy fun certainly plays a major role in these works. But there's more to it than that. The artists' invocation of the concept air-hunger, or dypsnea in medical terminology, brings a whole world of desperate, gasping human experience into play. A very common symptom in a wide variety of illnesses, air-hunger is of course the most immediately disturbing aspect of asthma and emphysema.

In some of the photos, Hillerbrand and Magsamen face each other in normal orientation, at once separated and united by the burgeoning pale pink gum. These can be wildly suggestive. "Crack," for example, shows the tips of each artist's nose at the upper corners of the frame, and their lips and chins; but at least three-quarters of the total area of the photograph is taken up with a glistening, almost flesh-colored mass suspended between their mouths. This could resemble buttocks, but really, it's more mysterious than that. It's something like a blank cartoon speech balloon, waiting for the inscription of the viewers' response. In other stills one of the artists is upside down, and together they seem like obscene putty sucking on a shared, globular halo. The Freudian theory-laden oral fixation cum (cum) sexual rivalry implied in those images has been a thematic concern in other Magsamen/Hillerbrand projects. In the multi-screen video installation "earth-hunger — the Great Race," for instance, also shown at the Butler, the pair run up and down the rows of a corn field, like contestants in an even more demented than usual reality TV show.

As the bubblegum series has continued, the bubbles have taken on a life of their own. Gradually, Magsamen's and Hillerbrand's profiles disappear into background shadows or off the edge of the frame entirely, leaving behind their breath. Whether you think of the remaining bubble entities as vaguely obscene sketches of immortality, or as a new life form entirely, is up to you. They can look like internal organs, for example, pulsing and beating, captured by some modern miracle of medical imaging.

At exit gallery, the artists display exclusively black-and-white pictures and video. Viewed through the gallery's big windows from the street, it looks like a show of astronomical photography — like shots of the moon or some other wanly illumined heavenly body. Closer examination doesn't do much to clarify the matter, either; for the most part the artists' presence has been elided from the finished photos, and what remains is simply an abstraction, a mystery. The largely abstract qualities and focus of Magsamen and Hillerbrand's installation "Coffee and Milk," seen recently at SPACES as part of the Misdemeanor group show (Free Times, December 20), were similar. That two-part video projection also started with a metaphor for personal interaction — the mingling of coffee and milk — with multiple implications involving intimacy and shared physical experience in general. And like Contractions of an Amorphous Solid, the actual presentation crossed, or traveled back and forth across, a formal frontier, moving from everyday experience into a realm of swirling, cosmic or microcosmic motion. But both works also retain peculiar hints of the human. In "Coffee and Milk," mouths (horrifyingly) penetrate the surface of the liquid, which was filmed in an aquarium. In context it's like a creature from a Lovecraft novel, swallowing the milky firmament. At Contractions it's more a matter of awareness. We can't quite see the human demiurges who make these planets swell in the studio's dark sky, but we know they're there.

Some of the stills at exit are matted and framed. This more formal presentation seems to emphasize the oddity of the images. At least one resembles Galileo spacecraft photos of Jupiter's ice moon Ganymede, scarred and pitted like Moby Dick's equally famous flank. Or could it be some undersea creature, glimpsed in the deep waters of the Mindanao Trench? Across from that, a video projection is split in two, like an open book, by the right angle formed by two walls, also bouncing off the triangle of floor between. Various sized bubbles wax and wane, dawn and sink beyond the horizon of the camera's lens. The sound component is a long, haunting, rolling, squishing loop. Gustav Holst's The Planets might seem to fit the rolling, planetary imagery, but Magsamen and Hillerbrand tend to lean as far away from the grandiose as they can, preferring to kid their audiences a little. The inscrutable sounds here are actually recordings of their washer and dryer, running through a few rinse and permanent press cycles.

Magsamen and Hillerbrand met and married a few years ago while working toward their MFAs at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since then their use of combined video and performance to consider the unfathomable depths of relationship issues has produced some genuinely exciting results, as well as attracting a fair degree of national attention. Developing metaphors for mutual boundaries, for the interpenetration of roles and the fluidness of identity that characterize any human relationship, the pair plumbs profound human concerns. Compared to the installations at the Butler, the Art Academy of Cincinnati and elsewhere around the country, the selection of stills and video work on view at exit seems like a sampling more than a show, leaving viewers hungry for a longer, deeper look at these artists' explorations. But that's all the more reason to drop by Tremont and grab an intro to some important contemporary work

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