GALLERY REVIEWS

Maps to creativity: Just follow

By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times

July 15, 2005

What's consistent here is change

Two striking video installations at SolwayJones apply high-tech visual seduction to the ancient wisdom of Heraclitus: You can't step twice into the same river.

Jim Campbell and Shirley Shor employ software that precludes the same combination of images and patterns from repeating in their work. Both installations evoke time's persistent forward momentum. From one moment to the next, neither we nor the river remain the same.

The Israeli-born, San-Francisco-based Shor showed a similarly engrossing piece at last year's California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. While that work had political undercurrents, this one is a more open-ended meditation on structure, stability and change.

The installation consists of a black box (3 feet by 4 feet, 1 foot deep) sitting on the floor. It's filled with fine white sand, but that surface is a vehicle for something more amorphous — an animate field of energy, colored lines coursing back and forth, horizontally and vertically, continuously weaving and reweaving a dense, luminous tapestry. Projected from above onto the miniature hills and plains of the sandbox, the grid of gold, black, caramel, lipstick, acid yellow, persimmon and olive represents serious, efficient play. The lines of traffic move smoothly, some faster, some slower, reiterating the basic structure but ever altering it. The installation, "Liquid Architecture," a beautiful enactment of fundamental processes, induces a hypnotic trance.

Campbell's piece also sustains long attention. Five monitors stacked one atop another present an ongoing sequence of overlapping images. Some are unified images — a nude figure, marble column or tall saguaro cactus — spanning the height of the tower. Others, of windblown cornstalks, a clear running stream, birds in flight and petroglyphs, fill a single frame and repeat across the five screens.

When viewers approach the installation, their abbreviated image appears on screen, thanks to a small camera mounted on the side of the monitors. The live presence appears in motion and then stilled, lingering then dissolving, like the layers of images it overlaps. Campbell, a Bay Area artist, has long engaged issues of memory and time in his work. In this piece, called "Ruins of Light," he stages a stirring meditation on permanence, transience and the nature of the traces we leave.

SolwayJones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 937-7354, through July 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.