Jillian Mayer. 34.11° N, -118.26° W at 53’ Inches, 2015; photograph printed on fabric; 46.2 x 26 in. Courtesy of the Artist, Aspect/Ratio Chicago, and David Castillo, Miami.

Jillian Mayer’s first solo exhibition in Chicago, Touchers, features two photographic works and a video installation that satirically probe the loss of identity in the digital age. Social media has informed, for most of us, our daily routines as well as our identities. By recognizing—and often succumbing to—the desires of being something we aren’t, or something slightly refined, Mayer playfully analyzes certain notions of human vs. machine within technology.

As a viewer, I’m familiar with the stylistic artifice in Mayer’s previous works, including 400 Nudes (2015), #Postmodem (2013), Scenic Jogging (2010), and How My Best Friend Died (2011). Her interest in questioning and exploring verisimilitude and physicality are themes continued in the two thermochromic transfers: 34.11° N, -118.26° W at 53’ Inches (2015) on fabric, and 25.84° N, -80.17° W at 65’ Inches (2015) on plexiglass. Created by a change in surface temperature caused by contact with the material, the thermochromic images retain a vague semblance of human form—the artist’s handprint. However, the multistage, mechanized fabrication process required to transfer these images onto another substrate adds higher orders of complexity and produces a dissociative effect aimed to distance the viewer from the human component of the work.

A monitor located in the adjacent gallery space depicts Mayer lip-syncing a pop song. A single chair is positioned in front of the monitor for an individual viewing experience. The light from a multicolored LED party strobe situated above the monitor cascades across the screen and highlights Mayer’s face as she sings to her digital audience. The work, analogous to the exhibition, is entitled Touchers (2015). On the left side of the screen, Mayer is present by webcam, and to the right of the screen, a chat-room dialogue with messages in blue text, both from anonymous and registered users. The comments (“I love you”; “Take it off”) appear desperate, often humorous, and collectively absurd. While the chat-room messages are sent from real people, their identities are abstract and their true selves are lost in translation.

The Miami artist’s oeuvre engages with the problematic topic of the digital age by lauding its connectedness and questioning its morality. The exhibition is conclusively a discussion about the determinacy of one’s identity in digital culture, and provokes thoughts of legitimacy and authenticity. It also spans the spectrum of Mayer’s ontology and specifically the boundaries of mechanization that currently challenge connotations of self-identity and human vs. machine interaction. The body of work adds to the discourse surrounding the human condition existing in conjunction with the current and emerging technological trends. Mayer seeks to rectify general humanistic inquiries that are embossed in the perpetuity of modernity.

Touchers is on view at Aspect/Ratio in Chicago through July 11, 2015.

S. Nicole Lane is an artist and writer living in Chicago.

Alex McLeod. "Jungle," 2011. C-print. 36 × 36 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

My first look at Alex McLeod’s work immediately reminds me of the photographs of James Casebere and Thomas Demand. Like these contemporaries, I assumed McLeod created these elaborate environments in his studio and photographed the resulting dioramas. Yet, there are textures, forms and lighting in these landscapes that defy the logistics of this approach. In Jungle, bulbous, glassy objects appear to float throughout the scene, reflecting light from far more sources than seems possible. Concentric circles pattern innumerable surfaces with detail beyond the scope of any human hand. It was a small flock of birds in the upper left corner, though, that finally led me to investigate the specifics of McLeod’s process in creating these whimsical environs.

McLeod uses various 3D modeling programs to construct computer-generated imagery, sometimes using appropriated models from online sources. Of his approach, the artist explains, “I wanted to negotiate a space between complexity for details sake, and simplicity for aesthetics sake, like baroque meets cartoon.” While he exploits technology to achieve hyperreal detail and attention to lighting, viable representations of familiar materials like wood and water render a more accessible reality. Moderating the dichotomy between real world and fantasy, McLeod seamlessly integrates moments of commonplace and virtual realities. While some of these environments exude lightheartedness – epitomized by bright, candy-like colors and playful forms reminiscent of scenes from the 1971 Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory – others nod to more ominous circumstances.

Alex McLeod. "Copper Cavern," 2011. C-print, 36 x 36 inches. Courtesy of the Artist.

McLeod exhibits these imagined landscapes as large-scale digital C prints; his smallest works are 32 x 48 inches. The physical size of his work facilitates the viewer’s transition into an alternate reality, by forcing engagement with unfamiliar details in the context of a somewhat recognizable world.

Alex McLeod: Distant Secrets opens at Angell Gallery in Toronto, Canada on August 25^th.

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.