Multimedia enhance SE art exhibition
by Brian Shults, se news editor

    Art always keeps the mind shuffling through a myriad of emotions, and the SE Campus exhibit Greenlight/Redlight: pictures moving and still is no exception.
    Digital video, computer animation and photography are the mediums of expression used by the artists.
    Tim Tracz, Kellie Connell and Kendell Davis employ still photography, traditional and digitally edited, which can cater to any mood.
    Superimposed memories, disquieting anger and the comfort of someone’s face are just a few of the elements contained in the photographs.
    On opposite sides of one wall, Dwayne Carter and Christine Shank utilize computer animation and video in hypnotic loops designed to keep the viewer off balance.
    “The exhibition features talented regional artists discovering the possibilities of pictures moving and still by dissecting the familiar in fresh new ways,” John Frost, a curator of the exhibit, said.
Frost and former SE gallery director, Derrick White, curated Greenlight/ Redlight in the Art Corridor II, and it runs through Friday, Oct. 5.
    “The exhibit’s imagery expresses a sense of nostalgia and intimacy. You have been there, somewhere similar or would like to go,” he said.
    A rural family stands beside piles of wreckage and recent disaster with expressionless faces.
    The only clues to their emotions are masks of tragedy and comedy gripped in their hands.
    Obviously, the broken boards and wreckage had been important to them, and now countenance is obsolete in expressing their grief.
    Tracz crafted the picture containing these images, which begins the exhibit.
    Tracz inadvertently created a picture relevant to numerous people, in light of America’s recent tragedy.
    Their disaster on a micro scale reflects the challenge of people everywhere who are unable to cope with ruin.
    “The images represent very recent attempts on my part to incorporate what I see as thematic possibilities using previous purely photographic work with a relatively new tool, Adobe Photoshop,” he said.
    His portrait collages of fake memories range from a dejected woman on a bicycle to father and son cutting birthday cake in an empty parking lot.
    “By fabricating shadows and adding subtle adjustments, I make in scale and positioning, I hope will enhance a mild sense of uneasiness in the viewer. I’m creating a fictitious family album of surreal snapshots. They [the pictures] represent a reality that can only be interpreted incompletely and with lots of question marks,” he said.
    Davis’ pictures may be the most engrossing of them all. Each one is no bigger than a wallet portrait and all cast in shades of blue. The people appear to be in anyone’s backyard and could be anywhere in time.
    “Those may not be your relatives, but they could be. They could have come from any family photo album,” Frost said.
    A crawling hand and fragmented woman are two of Connell’s pictures, titled Almost Touch and Waterbed.
    She uses traditionally developed photographs in a cut-up method permitting a sense of time in the horizontally arranged pictures. Other Connell works include juxtaposed images such as yarn and white-collar work shirts.
    Use of computer animation is the forum for Carter’s brief video loop. Figures of humans with jerky movements, similar to an action-figure, move in every part of the screen. The images all repeat unrhythmically to discordant synthesized sounds. Some figures have no faces, only small indistinguishable lines while others stare straight ahead with esoteric expressions.
    Flickering video segments of a woman’s perception of herself and immediate world end the exhibit in proper fashion.
    The trancelike video was created by Shank and includes shots of a woman shaving her head broken up by images of her deep in thought on her bed, which in turn is continually broken up by other actions for several minutes.
    The screen is cropped on all sides surrounding the images with a black frame giving it a picturesque quality. The video is balanced by a low obo-like tone completing the work.
    Greenlight/Redlight is on display Monday-Saturday 8 a.m.-9 p.m.