Michael Workman

Invisible elephants roam in herds.

Take Vancouver-born artist Rodney Graham's three new films, now at the Donald Young Gallery in the West Loop. First shown at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, they manage to both ask and dodge the answer to some elephant-size questions. Graham's work questions not only the relationships between nature and civilization but also the subtle shifts and occasional explosions across the realms of artistic category. There's immense freedom in the boundary-crossings of contemporary art, where each discipline borrows from and responds to advances in the other, and contemporary art thrives on questioning which is which. That question's also inherent in Graham's inquiry into artist and audience: the collective experience of film versus the individual of the art patron, the mass of people required to produce a motion picture versus the often individual occupation of the artist.

Opening night, crowds swarm. Two costumed mannequins greet visitors in the foyer, one dressed in an immaculate police officer's uniform and the other in a black-and-white-striped convict's outfit and cap. The costumes are worn by the artist and his guardian in "A Reverie Interrupted by the Police," a 35mm film (here transferred to DVD video). A red curtain parts. Graham walks onto a vaudeville stage, set with an upright piano, accompanied by a moustached man wearing the police uniform. Graham sits and, still handcuffed at the wrists, plunks out a few jarring notes. Close-up on his hands, moving above the black-and-white keys. The officer lords over him, arms crossed, smoke curling around his head and shoulders. A long shot of the stage, red curtain in the background. Graham continues to play, alternating between playful and insidious-sounding, bottomless tones. At one point, rather than strike piano keys, he bangs the wooden lid. More play on the keys. Both men exchange half-glances. Graham comes to a stop. The officer approaches, lays his hand on Graham's shoulder and leads him away. Curtain closes. The film loops continuously. Imprisoned in the viewer's gaze, as personified by the police officer, the artist's performance becomes unsustainable except as an exercise in pointless repetition.

Graham's second film, another 35mm-to-DVD transfer called "Loudhailer," plays in an adjacent, closed-door room. He has divided the image into two unsynchronized, square video projections with an unsynchronized CD audio soundtrack. The front and rear halves of the floating seaplane sway to and fro in choppy lake water on two separate canvas-like wooden panels. They move out of time with one another. On the right-hand panel, a man in a police uniform stands on the plane's pontoon, wearing a bright orange lifejacket and sunglasses, speaking into a bullhorn. Behind him sprawls a wide vista of forests, mountaintops and sky of the artist's native Vancouver. An accentuated soundtrack of splashing, dripping-water sounds blare in the foreground. Much of the man's stream of nonsensical phrases is obscured by the sound, though a few phrases manage to pop through. "I need a date." he calls out. "I repeat: I need a date!" Does this policeman represent the artist or the audience? Are the two indistinguishable, the front and rear of the same costumed cop?

In yet a third room plays the bluntly titled "Rheinmetall/Victoria 8." A 35mm film lights from a towering and antiquated Victoria 8 projector that faces the ten- or twelve foot-tall shining black and polished steel Rheinmetall typewriter. Image-maker and projected imagination merge. Here the audience clearly interacts. A white-haired woman in a black cloak walks up next to the typewriter, dwarfed, clutching her wine. Shadowy figures strut past, posing in clusters along the wall as the camera pokes inside the Rheinmetall's chassis, centering-in on a close-up of the stem and letterpad. Keys eight feet high. A shot of the typewriter's scripted logo and then, enigmatically, what looks at first like artificial snow starts to fall in a thin powder, disturbing the pristine surface. It's flour, falling in increasingly thick drifts to bury the typewriter. Cones form on the keys, piles shift and collapse as more fills in to cover the freshly exposed, still shiny surface. Not a word is typed, no document produced under this fine, snowy grain.

Lobby voyeur

A room pitched in darkness, the intro to Pachelbel's "Canon" playing over loudspeakers. A split-screen video projection. Two headless middle-aged torsos in sweaters and slacks are slumped into gilded cushions. One male, wearing a "Hello, I Am" sticker on his breast, one female. While the woman thumbs a pillow tassle, the man drums the knotted seam of his seat cushion, running his fingers slowly over the edge as if counting prayer beads.

Both are seated in San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel, the stage of Catherine Ross' undercover investigations into the world of idle moments. "Waiting" could easily beat out "Fairmont" for the title of this show. For tourists in-between what they're doing while staying in the hotel, the lobby's a public place where people lose awareness of themselves and have openly private moments. "The lobby becomes a kind of stage," explains Ross. "These people become actors. I perform a kind of observance."

Ross set up shop and sat for hours, waiting for the right moments. Her hunt required that she blend in. The strategy: a hotel lobby's a perfect setting for a girl with a camera, since everybody carries one on vacation. And it worked like a charm. Nobody she filmed was aware of her furtive ambition to find out "what's happening when nothing's happening." Ross' past work in this vein includes taping children watching a parade at Disney World. Of the fifteen shots she collected at the Fairmont, only two are on view in her show at Standard Gallery in Wicker Park, a loop of video that Ross refers to as her "edited version." An amusing description, given the unedited fidgeting and fooling of her subjects. Watching, it's hard not to wonder if you too are being watched, covertly, letting yourself go in an idle moment that happens everyday.

Rodney Graham shows at Donald Young Gallery, 933 West Washington, (312)455-0100, through January17. Catherine Ross shows at Standard Gallery, 1437 North Bosworth, (773) 486-1005, through December 20.

(2003-11-19)

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