Gallery Going
Gary Michael Dault
Narratives In Motion at Archive Inc.
Subtitled Stories of Movement, this engaging dual exhibition of new work by John Dickson and Gunilla Josephson brings together some of the motorized plaques from Dickson’s Magnetic Drawings series and two examples of Josephson’s recent forays into video (the artist was until recently, solely a maker of objects). The Dicksons are uncanny. With skillful recourse to the machination of magnets and motors, the artist has contrived a series of small vertical planes onto which his ball bearings cling and move. Some trace mindless, numbing little patterns- figure eights and such- while others are gathered together into complex, slow-moving constellations. This is, of course, is lots of fun. If there is a problem with these toy-like works, it lies in their inability to generate much meaning beyond the initial delight they provide. Josephson’s videos, made in France last fall, are a little more substantial. One, of apples spinning on a table top and eventually falling off, is a deft little mortality parable. The other, of a young woman bouncing about on an ornate couch, has been filmed so that the couch appears to be hanging upside down from the ceiling. The woman, mysteriously entrapped by the couch, leaps and rolls and rocks about (to the soundtrack of a rushing locomotive) until her rhythms gradually become the rhythms not of her struggle but of her own innate power. The Dickson Magnet Drawings are $1,800 each. The Josephson tapes are $400. Until March 27.