second of a few notes on “A Wrinkle in Time”

Baseera Khan and Johanna Taylor describe “A Wrinkle in Time” as artists responding to the barrage of dates and events of our time. Barrage is the right word indeed. I saw many of the artists in “A Wrinkle In Time” responding to the sheer flow of information today as much as to the information itself. For instance, Jason Varone’s “Landscape of Telecommunicated Sounds” uses sound clips of world crises as raw material in the creation of a physical landscape. In the context of so many others, each sound clip’s content is effectively erased and the whole becomes more important than the part. I could not help but think about how this reflects the way many listeners and viewers experience news media today—with compassion fatigue.

 

How do we overcome fatigue? What is the next phase? Josey Hale’s “Throw Down” begs those questions. As I walked around a tepee-construction of monochromatic, textless, protest signs, I thought about the double meanings of the phrase, “throw down.” Throw down your signs in defeat, I wondered, or does throw down signify the start of a new fight? The lack of text on the signs seemed to signify the artist’s critique of the power of traditional street protests, and yet the signs did not quite seem abandoned either, but anthropomorphized into a kind of huddle.

 

Hale and Varone’s pieces made me think about how overwhelming and disappointing it can be to live in a world where we are so interconnected to others while being unable to empathize or effect change we want.

 

In this new world context, Duke Riley’s “The Salad Days of Paul Pierce” cries artifact. By documenting the arrest of a homeless man through a monument-like mosaic, Riley reminded me of a time when the visual image took more effort and the individual human story was more important, while at the same time challenging us to decide which individual human stories deserve notice.

 

And so, I arrived back where I started, pondering the relationship between the flow of information and the information itself. Content is important, and will always be important—as long as we stop long enough to engage it.