RUNNING ‘INTERFERENCE’

Last week, I reviewed the exhibition “Light, Space, and the Shape of Time,” currently on view at the Albuquerque Museum. Sarah Bennett Davidson’s immersive video installation “Interference” at Bingo Art Studios and Gallery is the perfect complement to that show. It’s an example of how the ideas of the Light and Space movement remain salient for emerging artists, even when some of them, like Bennett-Davidson, have disabused themselves of the so-called “finish fetish” aesthetic.

“Interference” displays none of the overt perfectionism of Helen Pashgian’s or Larry Bell’s work. Her animated stripe videos are intentionally glitchy, the transparent scrims onto which they’re projected are imperfectly handcut, elements of the installation are held in place by hardware-store clamps and the space itself — complete with dirty walls and unswept floor — is part of an artist-run DIY space in what used to be a warehouse for old bingo equipment.

The funkiness of the space and the seemingly casual installation methods make “Interference” unpretentious and approachable, but they also belie the artist’s sneaky meticulousness.

Like the effortless nonchalance prized by Renaissance courtiers such as Baldassare Castiglione, Bennett-Davidson’s deliberately raw, provisional, unfinished style represents a clever ruse and an act of artful misdirection. She wants us to experience weird spatial disorientation effects, without thinking too much about the many hours of trial and error it must have taken her to create those effects. She makes it look easy.

The most amazing thing about “Interference” is that it only uses two video projectors. Both project simple, slightly glitchy animations of vertical stripes moving across the picture plane. Yet, because of the filters and scrims they’re projected through, the animations multiply from two to more than ten overlapping planes, and they cover multiple surfaces of the room, including the floor and the ceiling.

Sometimes the stripes cancel each other out. Sometimes their bidirectional flows produce mild sensations of vertigo. In the space near the entranceway, the planes of light fold into an origami-like shape, and the overlapping stripes produce moiré patterns.

There is a sound component, too, comprising simple sine waves broken up by crunchy sawtooth waves. Bennett-Davidson has programmed the stripes to respond to these sounds, giving a multisensory, synesthetic expression to the idea of interference.

“Interference” continues a century-old tradition of avant-garde animation that began with people like Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, who created cameraless films of dancing geometric shapes in the era of Charlie Chaplin.

Avant-garde animation fell out of favor

In Review

with the rise of narrative “talkies” but returned somewhat in the 1960s and ’70s, with “psychedelic” or “expanded” cinema and works like “Lines: Vertical” (1960) by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, and “Straight and Narrow” (1970) by Beverly Conrad and Tony Conrad — both of which used simple patterns of vertical and horizontal stripes to create dizzying effects.

Some Light and Space artists transferred geometric animations onto three-dimensional spaces. Anthony McCall’s “Line Describing a Cone” (1973), for instance, is simply a 30-minute film of a circle being drawn in two dimensions, but when projected through a fog-filled room, it creates the illusion of a solid cone of light.

In the decades since then, many video artists have used projected animations to create spatially confusing environments. Pipilotti Rist’s 2024 video installations at Hauser and Wirth in New York City, for example, used projections of vibrantly colored, animated textures to turn midcentury modern living rooms into weird, trippy, liminal dreamscapes.

So, “Interference” is not the first artwork to use abstract animated patterns to produce feelings of spatial confusion, but it’s one of the best I’ve seen.

Bennett-Davidson, who is a current Master of Fine Arts student at the University of New Mexico, studied with Merce Cunningham in the early 2000s, when the avant-garde choreographer was using a computer software program to generate choreographic routines. The Cunningham connection puts her in a direct lineage with video installation pioneer Nam June Paik, who collaborated extensively with Cunningham. More recently, Bennett-Davidson has been working with the NODE Institute, a Berlin-based organization that promotes the use of computer programming by artists. So, she is well versed in algorithmic art and how to transpose digital effects onto three-dimensional spaces.

But what makes “Interference” new is not simply that it’s a maximally confusing space produced by a few simple elements, although that’s certainly an impressive feat. What makes it new is its informality. Like the drop cloth aesthetic that permeates much of contemporary abstract painting, Bennett-Davidson’s installation has an easy, breezy, almost slapped-together feel. And this illusion of nonchalance is what allows “Interference” to surprise us, because it’s only when our perception of reality distorts and the walls move and shift before our very eyes that the artist’s true brilliance is revealed.

Doubtless to say, “Interference” cannot be adequately described in words or pictures but must be experienced firsthand.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.