Eve Andrée Laramée at Emory Visual Arts Gallery
Eve Andrée Laramée, Halfway to Invisible
I stumbled upon an exceptional art show at the Emory Visual Arts Gallery quite by accident. (Don’t you just love it when you find powerful art this way and not because of extreme media or social pressure?) Art can have an uncanny impact when it surprises the unsuspecting. My discovery at Emory reminds me of some my first experiences with good art in empty spaces that made me into the art addict I am today.
Eve Andrée Laramée’s Halfway to Invisible is a reminder from an old school professional just how powerful installation art can be, if properly attuned to its political subject and completed with stylish abandon. Laramée has transformed a one room gallery into an elegant science fiction set that draws attention to a real story about Uranium mines in the Western United States. The lights are dim. The sound is emotive yet not overdone. Lamarée’s minimal blocking dramatizes a vague narrative. It also presents the hard facts about a purposefully hidden history and American Indian peoples the U.S. couldn’t have cared less about.
Detail of Halfway to Invisible
Laramée successfully employs the natural space of the gallery (a vertical cave). Repeating shiny metal surfaces and the color blue help dramatize it as a cold place filled with the uneasy mystery of a mine. Two steel cages, centrally placed, rattle every so often in the dark. These sounds remind the visitor of invisible canaries, perhaps, or animal testing. A desk with a light is placed next to an odd suitcase with a fictional radon level detector inside. A circular video screen is implanted in the detector. Numerous small backlit circles on the walls mirror its shape and contain awkward little viewing lenses. The images inside have reversed white words in American Indian languages and English. This is the most forced part of the show—a kind of political art à la the 1980s—but it still works. (Although I do wonder what kind of imagery could have been used here instead … perhaps stereoscopes of New Mexican landscapes, or subterranean vistas instead of only those redundant biological-telescopic images? Who knows. I guess Laramée wanted to bring home the DNA damage message.)
Overall this show is a most excellent treat. Go see it while it’s up, preferably on a quiet, rainy afternoon.
“Eve Andrée Laramée: Halfway to Invisible” is on view at the Emory Visual Arts Gallery through Fri. Mar. 6.
