April 21-May 19
Track 16 Gallery is presenting an exhibition of Janie Geiser’s multifaceted works of video projections, photography, and animatronics. Geiser’s work excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct our daily world. Geiser describes her new video installation Look and Learn Parts 2, 4, and 5, “In recent moving image work, I've been obsessed with unearthing possible and impossible narratives from found images. In Look and Learn Parts 2, 4, and 5, I rephotographed a series of found photographs—mainly 1950’s era school class photos – and juxtaposed them with a range of visual instructions (furniture assembly diagrams, how-to manuals, safety instructions, maps, etc), suggesting the sometimes-destructive influence of the adult-created structures that frame childhood and the practices of institutional learning.”
These 1950’s photographs, which place the students in unforgiving grids, suggest a more orderly
time, when such instructions might actually be followed. As the three-channel installation progresses, the images are harder to grasp. The movement of the photos, along with other documentary photographs of anti-war and civil rights era protests, were filmed quickly under the camera, the images are barely legible. There are glimpses of faces, there is a sense of chaos, of a rushing forward and
backwards, of time out of reach, of change that moves forward and then
backwards---then, now, later.
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