Anna Frants & Alexandra Dementieva "Shine A Light”
Share Friday, January 22, 2010 at 5:37pm

Anna Frants’ new installation asks the ever-current question, “What if we learned to consciously sift out visual rubbish?” Moving image is a form of communication that by definition lumps pictures for recognition and by use exceeds the capacity of visual information table to be absorbed. The contemporary brain is conditioned to read 30 individual frames per second and from film to tv to youtube - moving images are an indelible and irreplaceable language of modern society. We discern what is flashed before us through routine, by method, for necessity in order to comprehend meaning.

It is a learned behavior, an unconscious reaction, a human response. (Thank you, Lumière Brothers! We are salivating to your picture!)

But from all that is flashed to trick the brain into seeing one moving picture- which still frames deserve regard?

Anna Frants’ installation “Conversation” employs the obsolete technology, a slide projector, to slow down the pace of the individual frames within moving images. Reversely, she employs the use of slide projectors to cast a plethora of simultaneous images which implore each viewer to use visual discretion and make conscious decisions.

Alexandra Dementieva asks, “Who’s out there?” As guests, the audience pays a house call on unsuspecting residents. Buzzing one of eight bells summons dwellers of a fantasy apartment building to their open window. Projected video of the tenants - servants, intellectuals, wealth, middle-class, professionals, immigrants and criminals - gives the voyeur access to society’s home life.

NY Art Beart