Frank Gillette: Spectra Obscura

Microscope is very pleased to present _Spectra Obscura_, a solo exhibition of new, recent, and historic works by video artist Frank Gillette. The show marks the New York debut of Gillette's complete _The Symbiotic Blues_, a trilogy of 3-channel video works completed between 2017 and 2022, on view with selections from his 1987, 20 x 24-inch Polaroids series _Chthonic Chimera_, and two early videos, _Hark! Hork!_ (1972-73) and _Symptomatic Syntax_ (1981), among others. Since the 1960s, Gillette has employed video technologies in visionary, experimental works rooted in the mediated perception of the self and concerns for the environment, especially in relation to humans' seemingly inexorable journey towards ecocide. In his works, the term "ecology" also extends to "media ecology," in which technological ecosystems bring about awareness, social change and, ultimately, new cultures. The title of the show references the camera obscura, considered as the first known device capable of rendering images of our surrounding world. Gillette's _The Symbiotic Blues_ conveys nature's fragility and resilience, as well as the urgency of its ongoing devastation, through three 3-channel video installation works. Utilizing the pictorial tropes of _landscape_ and _still life_ in video form, the series gradually shifts from _Riverrun_'s ( 2017-2018) pastoral scenes to _Spearlight_'s (2019) kaleidoscopic digital manipulations and _Blackseer_'s(2022) increasingly somber and cataclysmic scenarios. Each consists of three separate video channels of varying durations, resulting in never-repeating combinations suggesting the perpetual time of ecologic life. Mirrors, recurrent elements of Gillette's, appear frequently on beaches and in woods where they are used to generate disorienting optical illusions. Fragments of broken mirrors accentuate the sense of nature's vulnerability. _"My work has always dealt with the natural world in all its guises and The Symbiotic Blues is the latest invocation of these complexities. While employing video in the late sixties with Portapaks given to me by Marshall McLuhan, new technologies have allowed me to capture details extending my visions. All nine channels revolve around the woodlands and beaches of eastern Long Island, which are fecund with wildlife and botanical forms. Being immersed in such an environment became a data bank of processes generating the osmotic spectrum between nature and culture." — FG_ His Polaroid series _Chthonic Chimera_ were photographed with one of only a handful of 20×24 cameras produced in the late 1970s. Composed of unlikely assemblages of sea shells, flowers, butterfly wings, coral skeletons, insects, stones, and other elements the artist gathered and staged, these images preserve the breadth and transient beauty of natural life in photographic tableaux. Standing in dialogue with the Polaroid series, the 1981 video _Symptomatic Syntax_ depicts a changing aquatic environment of plant and other natural specimens, at times stationary and at others floating. Overtime, the familiar life forms become increasingly abstract and acquire uncanny colorations. The accompanying sounds feature various running water sources and a woman's voice delivering philosophical arguments about the "unreality of time" from the 1908 book by J.M.E. McTaggert. With the single-channel video _Hark! Hork!_ (1972-73), which was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, Gillette offers an ode to our planet that also serves as a study of early video's ability to capture the grace and might of the environment. Taking its name from a dream sequence in _Finnegan's Wake_, the piece is constructed as an intricate montage of black and white imagery of the ocean, sky, waterfalls, fields, seagulls, and a limulus, among others. Floral still lifes are juxtaposed with a strobing installation of white flowers and triangular mirrors in the artist's studio. Gillette integrates within the work's mostly music-based soundtrack recitations of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in _Ulysses_, a passage from T.S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_, and a rendition of Blake's _The Sick Rose_ by Allen Ginsberg. In _Rio Grande River Bed_ (1974) we find the arid, cracked river bed of the Rio Grande as photographed by the artist in 81 color instant Polaroids and set in a large grid. Whether due to seasonal low flows, climate change, man-made water diversions, or all of these, this fragmented depiction of a former life-giving waterway registers today as a haunting 50-year old warning.