Although there were a lot of pieces at the welcome back show in the Mason Gross gallery the pieces that really caught my eye were the two digital prints by Shane Whilder in the main room. Both depicted the same digital landscape in a pixilated mosaic-like pattern with the left one rendered in dark tones and the other in lighter tones. To me it looked like shots of night and day in some digital landscape. The landscape itself was very empty with just some rolling hills going off into the distance. No other shapes except for these rolling hills and the faded wash of color above, which I interpreted as a sky. They’re simple pieces visually but that’s what I like about them.
They remind me of early 3D video game landscapes during a time when developers had to make full environments using barely emerging technology. To do this developers would first create an infinitely empty flat plane and then wall off the area that the player would interact with. The player wasn’t supposed to see this infinite plane of nothing but sometimes there were glitches where one could find himself outside of the set boundaries and wander around.
As a kid this happened to me here and there and whenever I would see this it gave me this eerie feeling. Once I remember actually walking out into this nothing for a good hour and not seeing anything all the while having this feeling of loneliness. It was both creepy and strangely captivating. That’s what I felt like when I saw Shane’s pieces and the more I looked at them the more I felt that sense of infinite nothing.
The piece that bothered me the most was next to Shane’s and it was the installation done by Raphael Ortiz that included a large poster and TV screen that continuously played “Brother Can You Spare A Dime?”. I’ll admit that when it comes to Graphic Design I can be nitpicky but I usually don’t let it sway my opinion too much. However the poster Ortiz has designed was, as I saw it, not designed well. There were multiple cases of squished text and text that had terrible resolution, in fact the images even had poor resolution. I don’t know if there was a point being made with the design but if there was it went over my head because I was just focused on multiple problems I had with the poster.
As for the idea of the piece I could see what Ortiz was trying to say but it seems to fall flat. Maybe it was because of the images of elephants raining down from teabags or the music playing over 1920s depression images or it just could have been the design flaws but I just couldn’t get behind the message the artist was conveying. I kept coming back to the piece trying to see it in a different light but I couldn’t bring myself to feel compelled.
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