Marina Zurkow at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery

Elixir IV from Marina Zurkow on Vimeo.

Dive, little man, dive. In Marina Zurkow’s video piece, “Elixir IV,” currently on view at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery (1241 NW Johnson), a crude, clip-art-ish platform diver does a twisting back one-and-a-half again and again. And while the piece and its sister “Elixir I” (which was a still projection when I visited UPDATE: but is now functioning) are riveting for their painterly and hypnotic motion of rotating crystal vessel through an ice-dotted sea near sheer walls of ice while layers of cloud or smoke drift and billow both inside the bottle out, it was the little man’s repetitive sequence that got me thinking.

I loved the phased piece of music Tim DuRoche composed for a recent Tere Mathern dance performance. Based on a morse code phrase, three repeating sequences at three tones slipped into and out of phase with one another, setting up dynamic rhythmic interplays.

There as in Elixir, repetition can have the counterintuitive effect of increasing the viewer/listener’s focus (or in my case, alertness). That is, if you have a viewer who’s game.

After watching “Elixir IV” for a while projected as it is at an ambitious scale—large enough that it attempts, like a Rothko or an IMAX movie screen, to envelop your sensory field—it becomes clear that yes, the sequence is in fact the same every time you see it: he’s doing the same dive again and again. The mind “solves” that bit of the piece and moves on. But meanwhile, in the patient awareness that that “reading” the man requires (willful and elaborate falling? futility? heroics? daily-ness? work?), there is time for the mind to wander over the other visual details of the piece (slipping from fore- to background and back) particularly as they change, but only slightly— the crystal vessel with a little digital splash at its neck slowly rotates; the clouds that move across the field or bubble up inside the vessel, that change color. The accompanying sound, a subtle and insistent machine thrum, also pulses and changes, but only slightly.

I’m grateful too, that although apparently Zurkow looks at the work she’s doing as narrative, this piece at least could bear any number of readings deriving from the desolate beauty of the frigid background, the juxtaposition of the hand-drawn (human-made) vessel and figure with the video of the natural: water and cloud, metaphors of water, the man’s containment, his repetitive action. The duration of the piece allows ample time to weave and unravel readings.

And don’t take this little video for it (above), go see it at scale in the darkened Feldman gallery.