City Hall's Gallery One exhibition of UNM digital art faculty, intriguing if confusing

Gallery One at Albuquerque’s City Hall is hosting its first exhibition of digital art, and let’s hope it’s the first of many.

“Signal and Trace” presents the work of ten digital artists, who are all University of New Mexico faculty members or emeriti.

To understand the curatorial framework behind “Signal and Trace,” it’s necessary to understand multiple definitions of both words, so bear with me for just a moment.

In the world of electronics and printed circuit boards, traces are the physical pathways along which electrical signals travel. So, if we think of electrical signals as cars, the traces are the highways.

In art theory, “indexical traces” are the marks or imprints that connect an artwork directly to its subject or its maker. Handprints in prehistoric cave art are a good example of indexical traces, since they are the direct imprint of the hand of the artist. The philosopher Jacques Derrida defined the trace as the mark of the absence of a presence. So, in the case of prehistoric handprints, they’re the physical marks of people who died long ago. The traces make their physical absence palpable.

Signals, by contrast, are symbolic representations — the word “hand,” for instance, as opposed to an actual handprint.

All the works in “Signal and Trace” use digital media, and they all have a narrative component. So, the definitions of “signal” and “trace” from electronics and linguistic theory are both applicable here.

It’s an interesting, if somewhat overwrought, curatorial framework, and it works better for some pieces than others.

One of the best examples of distortion and loss in the show is Mary Tsiongas’ and Jim Roeber’s room of sound-augmented archival images of silk moths and silk factories, taken from the Tbilisi State Silk Factory’s archive from Tbilisi, Georgia. Although I couldn’t quite make out what crackly, hissing sounds I was hearing in the audio, it brought to mind the high, screechy sounds of silkworms being boiled alive in giant vats, which I first heard at a silk factory in China when I was 14. At the time, everyone said it was just air escaping from the cocoons, but I didn’t believe them. Production and decay are bound together in silk processing, and in the material itself. The caterpillars unwittingly weave their own death shrouds, and silk, made by moths, can also be eaten by moths. So, the creepy audio and grainy photographs become decaying traces of processes already tied to cycles of decay.

Valery Jung Estabrook’s “RETURN,” a video projection on layers of translucent fabric, uses doubling and fading to communicate loss. I first saw this piece at Bingo Art Gallery, where it occupied its own darkened room, but I felt it was just as effective here in a gallery with more ambient light. If anything, the slightly faded look gives the birds and wrinkled human hands in the video a more poignant quality, suggestive of fading memories.

Chanee Choi’s “Remembrance” is a work of biofeedback-gamified performance art and a meditation on the fragility of consciousness through the lens of both Alzheimer’s disease and AI. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see the actual performance, just documentation of it, which is projected in a brightly lit hallway outside the gallery. Whereas Estabrook’s video is still legible, despite the ambient light, Choi’s is much less so. In fact, I wouldn’t have known what I was seeing if I didn’t have the description. I’m just glad to be aware of Choi’s work now, which is sophisticated and deeply felt, and I look forward to seeing it someday in a better light — literally.

Most other artists in “Signal and Trace” are not focused on loss and decay, and there are no examples of glitch art or heavy digital distortion here. By and large, the artists seem to want to communicate with relative transparency, rather than calling attention to what’s gotten lost or warped in the electronic mediation.

For instance, Ramona Emerson’s “Hidden Talents” is a very good documentary portrait of the Navajo artist James Woolenshirt King, but it could have just as easily been shot on film. It was one of my favorite things in the show, but it’s a documentary short, not video art.

Jacob Kader’s “Gordian Knot” is a video installation that revolves around a physical prop — a rope as thick as a Burmese python, tied in a simple knot. The installation consists of the actual knotted rope in front of a video in which the knot is shown to represent a timeline of global wars. As in the ancient Greek legend, the character in the video cannot untie the “knot” of intractable conflict. This is a good idea for an art piece, but as a former Boy Scout who spent years perfecting my bowlines and sheet bends, I can tell that Kader is not a knot guy. Compared to Maren Hassinger’s knot installations from the early 1970s or Sheila Pepe’s crocheted nylon paracord pieces, Kader’s easy-to-untie knot undercuts the seriousness of his message. The piece would have been more effective if each war were represented by its own knot, which would collectively create a giant knot ball, perhaps with the character in the video slowly becoming trapped inside. “Gordian Knot” has nothing to say about digital media, either. Like Emerson’s piece, it could have just as easily been shot on film without altering the meaning.

Stewart Skylar Copeland’s “Observation Arena” bills itself as a video game, but it isn’t. It’s really a “talking head” video of the artist and his fiancee discussing her choice to use an AI portrait as her LinkedIn profile pic. The Xbox controller only allows viewers to rotate their view and zoom in and out, but nothing else — unless there’s a secret cheat code I missed. If the relative lack of interactivity is meant to mirror people’s lack of agency in online corporate spaces, a more complex gameplay with countless dead ends may have been more interesting. As it is, the Xbox conceit feels like a poorly thought-out gimmick, which detracts from Copeland’s simple but intriguing video.

Marie Alarcón’s “Coded” displays a digital avatar of the artist’s child on a spinning LED hologram fan. Artists like Jennifer West and Rachel Rossin have done more interesting things with hologram fans, so if you want a better example of Alarcón’s artistic vision, ask to see “the vault.” A gallery employee will lead you to a secret, room-sized metal vault, which the artist has transformed into a fictional revolutionary’s secret lair, complete with mysterious black flags, a barbed-wire-enwreathed peacock chair and a digital avatar of the artist as a pirate-zombie called Papi Leon. This installation, titled “American Archipelago” is technically not part of “Signal and Trace,” though it fits well thematically and is a definite must-see.

My favorite piece in the show was R. Lee Montgomery’s installation of large-format Polaroids taken through a thermal imaging filter. Sometimes the medium is the message, and that’s the case here, where Polaroid film, associated with 1970s mug shots, meets the thermal imaging of today’s airport body scans or sniper goggles. Human warmth is the one thing thermal imaging devices are built to capture, but the one thing they can never possess. So, the ghostly photographs are imprinted with the residue of human warmth as viewed through a cold, cybernetic Terminator eye. Unsettling, yet strangely beautiful.

As a former director of a university art gallery (many years ago), I know what it’s like to curate faculty shows where you have to shoehorn artworks into a prefab theme, and I suspect that’s what may have happened here. The multiple meanings of “signal” and “trace” do provide interesting frameworks for interpreting some of the art in the show, but for others, it just creates confusion.

Regardless, there’s strong work here, and it’s a great way for Albuquerque residents to familiarize themselves with some of the University of New Mexico’s faculty who work in digital media. Most of them are stellar. So, go see “Signal and Trace” before it closes on Aug. 15.

City Hall's Gallery One exhibition of UNM digital art faculty, intriguing if confusing