The Soap Factory
Minneapolis, MN
September 13 - October 26, 2008

“In other words, we rely upon the overly simple circle which has as its content the passing present and as its shape the part of reminiscence. However, the order of time, time as a pure and empty form, has precisely undone that circle. It has undone it in favour of a less simple and much more secret, much more torturous, more nebulous circle…” – Gilles Deleuze

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To some, there’s comfort in the notion that ‘history repeats itself’. If historical events can be thought of as a set of similarly recurring episodes, then history is a resource that can be drawn from for the experience and knowledge necessary to stem imminent wars, natural disasters, and cultural upheaval. Instead of being unprepared by the future, we’re able to predict it. This way of thinking about history does a few things. In terms of how history is written or visualized, it creates a series of events that succeed each other while creating affinities to what has already happened. More problematically, the trouble with ‘history repeats itself’ is that it creates, through repetition, too tidy an equivalence across events that are actually very different. We’re more interested in creating a likeness rather than appreciating the nuances of what has happened that make every event unique.
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Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MAEP Galleries
January 25 - March 16, 2008

[Originally published in Art Papers (June/July) 2008]

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Perhaps every encounter with art is an invitation to suspend our disbelief. Some works try harder than others to do so, and with others we’re barely rewarded for the effort. But with Andréa Stanislav’s installation River to Infinity - The Vanishing Points, 2008, in at least entertaining the thought for a moment, we’re given an opportunity to see how belief operates as a principle of representation; in believing that some thing is ‘here’ we can recognize it. And sometimes, recognition is all we need to remind ourselves that belief is still possible. Or, put another way, seeing is believing.

In one gallery of this two gallery exhibition, Stanislav wall mounted a number of massive mirrors that, when reflected within each other, open up numerous portals to illusionary, endlessly receding spaces. Of these, her Portrait - Ghost I , III, V & VI (all from 2008), etched with remnants of Edward S. Curtis’s famous North American Indian archive project, don’t ask that you believe in ghosts. In existing at the edge of presence and recognition, right on the surface of each mirror as barely-there portraits by a long-gone photo adventurer, they evoke the agonies of American history; in catching their eye, you’re reminded there is such a thing as a collective memory of traumatic events that aren’t so tidily separated from the present.

Stanislav has worked with cosmograms, mirrors and continental maps before, yet never together in a single piece. On opposite walls of the same gallery, she’s installed two massive mirrored astrological charts, Portrait I & Portrait II (both 2008) of the first Continental Congress of 1774 and the dates for provocations that have lead to all of America’s major wars. These aren’t maps or portraits per se. The birth of a nation combined with the inauguration of hostilities is a reminder that all beginnings require a rupture, and in leveraging her lo-fi special effects with astrological forecasting, she creates a kind of ‘cultural personality’. Looking into the mise-en-abyme of images that recede into the past and also stretch into the future, the infinite reproductions that we see are not exact likenesses, but at the same time we know how these hostile events have a way of repeating themselves.

The adjacent gallery’s twin video projections bookending floor- and ceiling-mounted mirror rivers are more attuned to how monuments, landscape, and one-point linear perspective are important tools of empire. Arrayed like gems on a jeweler’s velvet, Stanislav staged 9 mirrored obelisks in the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah for her video River to Infinity – The Vanishing Points (2008). We also see some close up shots of an owl and a mirror-eyed seer, each of them recalling mythological figures with extra-sensory powers of future vision and knowledge. The perfectly timed explosion, a dynamite and gasoline fireball composed by a pyrotechnics expert, that reduces the obelisks to rubble is both a beautifully creative and violent force. Once the dust settles, Stanislav conjures some lo-fi camera magic and reverses the diegetic destruction to bring the obelisks back to whole. Her rewind-repeat trick isn’t an elaborate and seductive illusion. The effect asks us to (re)witness the explosions over and over again, and in doing so, we see a resurrection of sorts. But instead of an opportunity to restart and avoid the inevitable, it’s a return to the beginning of a story that will repeat over and over again.

This loop of life and death that echoes through out all the work in both galleries keeps bringing us back to reiterations of circles, cycles, rotations and orbits. Still, the work doesn’t push too hard or try to convince us to believe in any specific model of time. Stanislav’s work, in looking across visual culture, is more concerned with critiquing and aestheticizing how different conceptions of repetition and return are common denominators that operate, to varying degrees, in all theologies, ideologies, and historiographies.