Aryen Hoekstra: The Flicker
It looks at first like a boring room of black canvases with a little variety in the paint’s application.
I don’t hold onto this initial impression and make my way around, counter-clockwise, to see what else there is.
I see popcorn resting atop the fifth canvas, and my interest is piqued. The room is an installation, not a display.
I notice popcorn strewn about the floor, as if unswept after a reception (unusual snack for a reception though…) — or, more fitting, as if between the rows of a movie theater.
A Werther’s Original wrapper, tightly crumpled, rests atop the next canvas.
On the wall opposite the entrance to the room, a canvas covers a text. It looks like this arrangement repeats four times across the wall.
But I notice the arrangements are not identical. The equally-spaced canvases seem to travel horizontally across the equally-spaced texts, as if under a strobe… a strobe like a movie projector, its shutter alternately exposing a frame and blocking the light. The unframed canvases are film frames.
A canvas is mounted nearly flush with a corner. I turn to see the first canvas mounted nearly flush with the end of a wall.
I realize the room’s geometry requires this unusual mounting in order to achieve an equal spacing of the canvases, without bending canvases into corners.
At home, I edit the notes and photos I took at the exhibition. I watch a video I took, which confirms my expectation of 24 canvases to match the 24 frames per second of a movie projection.
I read the exhibition essay by Gareth Long and learn that Aryen Hoekstra’s The Flicker refers to Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, a 30-min stroboscopic film that “consists of entirely black and white (actually clear) frames.” In the installation, the clear frames were represented between the black canvases by their absence.
The flicker of a movie projector, whose shutter alternately admits and blocks light, becomes invisible at 24 frames per second; humans don’t perceive the black between frames. But in the installation, it’s the clear frames between the black frames (light between black) that are invisible. The absence of light (the black canvas) is instead visible.
I read a copy of the poster on the wall that a gallery assistant gave me as I left. The essay and poster are more art historical, art theoretical, art critical, or otherwise art referential. But, for me, the installation was profound it its coherence and readability. Once read, it affords a more personal and deep reflection on film and perception, and an exploration of the metaphors of light and dark, visible and invisible.
