November, 2004
In this season of unprecedented political media buys, 24-hour news cycles, and endless commentary, media inundation seems almost a ho-hum concept. But the effects of such a deluge have become like an untested drug: no one really knows the impact of it yet, and we, the contemporary culture, are the unwitting test group.

Paul Rowley, an Irish artist who was once on track to becoming a doctor, is compelled by the saturation of visual language and the “residue” it leaves on the collective conscious. Even more interestingly, he notes, is how it has never been more possible to manipulate that residue to convey or control meaning. He should know: as a visual artist, Rowley and his collaborator, David Phillips, use found and sometimes familiar imagery, and doctor it into haunting videos that invoke provocative narratives. Take Security Fugue, a particularly topical video that examines the line of intrusion vs. safety when it comes to homeland security. In it, a helicopter landing occupies one screen and a medical rescue team the other, the narratives of each screen colliding. The whir of the helicopter blades is accompanied by the distorted voices of Patty Hearst, the heiress prisoner captured by SLA in 1974, as well as those in trauma therapy sessions. What was once innocuous footage taken from a 1971 Hollywood melodrama called Doctor's Wives now assumes a more surreal and disturbing posture. Post 9.11, the helicopter becomes both menacing and portentous; the medics shift to a personification of innocence lost. And the audio - unintelligible apart from a few words from Patty Hearst and the others - matches the cadence of the helicopter blades in an apocalyptic drumbeat. Like the Pointillist painters who evoked narratives through a fusion of dots, Rowley and Phillips induce an emotional spectrum through a finely wrought juxtaposition, melding, and manipulation of twelve seconds of film.
“We live in a fractured world,” says Rowley, “and there are many rich ideas to be found in something small. Condensing things down and then expanding on them give each element a focus. There's something quite poetic to be found in that model.”

The poetry of the videos resides in more than just their visuals, which are beautifully rendered. In Condensate and Gwai-Lo, for instance, the ordinary (children's faces and urban scenes of commuting and commerce, respectively) are kaleidoscopically dissolved and reshaped, creating a carousel whirl of color, sound, and light. In both, one longs for such imagery precisely because it treats traditionally documentary subjects with a lush palette. Saturation has provoked in the contemporary mind a thirst for less reality, or less of the subjectivity masquerading as reality. We crave more emotion, more of the intangibles that can only be understood in the abstract mind. This work quenches.

And this sets up the beauty beyond the aesthetics of the team's work. While the use of found imagery and recontextualized art (e.g. photos taken of photos; novels about prior novels) often precedes the complaint that there are no original ideas left - that society is resorting to the past because the present is tired - Rowley and Phillips's work has a genuine aim. Why not take imagery and language that is so often used to manipulate the public and give it new and perhaps more honest meaning? It asks, in the case of Security Fugue, if there is something more sinister at work in our traditional depictions of heroism? What is the political residue and ideological impact of the cliché imagery in medical dramas? Or, in the case of Gwai-Lo, can the commerciality in our cities represent more than progress and industry? Does it better identify, through the video's visual meltdown engineered by Phillips and Rowley, the dissolution engendered by consumption?

What Rowley and Phillips do is make the manipulators the manipulated. It's a curious and engaging place for art and civilization to intersect, and it might just be the necessary medicine for these overdosed times.

Paul Rowley, whose work has been screened and exhibited in London, New York, Dublin, and Seville, will give an artist talk and show videos for November's MacDowell Downtown on Thursday, November 4th at 7:30 pm. As always, MacDowell Downtown is free and open to the public. Refreshments are served. To join MacDowell e-News, please go to our web site at www.macdowellcolony.org.