Cryptids | Beate Geissler + Oliver Sann

                Iceberg Projects: September 14 – October 19, 2013

Cryptid: noun;

• an animal whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated, such as the yeti.

“It’s a bit like walking on insects.” Oliver Sann said aloud, humming along Lakeshore Drive on the 151 Sheridan bus sometime around February of 2013. Had he not stepped off the bus somewhere around Diversey and Sheridan he might’ve continued on another 40 minutes or so to Iceberg Projects in Roger's Park where his exhibition Cryptids would open in September.

Walking up the driveway and through the pregnant back garden of Daniel S. Berger MD, you are confronted with the open door of the doctor’s carriage house cum art-space that is Iceberg. Stepping through the threshold into the space there is a large portrait style photograph of a blind horse against a black background. The room is predominately dark with the exception of a spotlight on this, and the two other photographs located on the front and back of another wall that bifurcates the space into two separate rooms.  On each side of the bifurcated wall there is a photograph of an insect. The insects are photographed in their entirety, almost scientifically, and like the blind horse, against what is a completely black void. Facing one of the insect portraits in the back-section of the space is a large black velvet curtain that covers the entirety of the wall. The blackness of the curtain is mirrored in the background of each photograph, as well as in the hundreds of LCD screens that are being tread upon by the viewer in their navigation of the space. These defunct screens cover the ground from wall to wall in all variations of size, forcing the entirety of the viewer’s body weight upon what is no longer a functioning image apparatus. One is reminded of Walead Beshty’s Passages where the ground of an exhibition space was covered in mirrored glass to be fractured as the viewer moved about the floor. The sound of the screens crunching about the space begins to generate an interesting dialogue with those photographs on the walls of the space. The blindness of the horse, made visible in the photograph by the graphic malformation of it’s eye socket can be mirrored in the nakedness and cracks upon the surface of the varying black screens about the floor. The horse is a historically powerful animal whose energy has been harnessed by human beings for ages, and for the purposes of traveling faster, or for longer distances. Without sight, the horse is rendered near useless. Of what benefit is it to be carried faster by something that sees not where it is going? This question seems to resonate somewhere in the blackness of those load-bearing LCD screens, whose image content and visibility relies on a constant stream of power. How does that which is seen relate to what is being carried? In this way the black of the curtain, the black of the background, these appear to be a mere surface in relation to the blackness of the screens. The black of the screens comes not from a deliberate construction of color, or absence of color, but from the absence of content and energy. Without power we see black. It makes you wonder what we’re seeing when the pixels are alive. The use of screens in this exhibition harkens Hito Steryl’s Strike (2010), a 30 second video/performance work where the artist slyly approaches a black flat-screen monitor with hammer and chisel in hand, as if she were approaching a wild animal, or a live marble sculpture, and strikes the screen creating what is a colorful fractal suggesting the end of the screen’s useful intended function as a transmitter of images. Steyerl, in her collection of essays The Wretched of the Screen further explores many of these ideas in relation to speed and the collected abuse that accompanies the digital image in its movement through networks.  It is here in this complex between image and absence, power and lack there of, that the idea of the cryptid seems to exist. Is that animal we think we’re harnessing, witnessing, really there at all? Suddenly the insect photographs seem quite poignant, and not merely for their reference to the crunch of the LCD screens. The photographs of the insects are slightly out of focus, and in considering the cryptid/power/image relationships that are budding, it makes one wonder if what we’re seeing is the insect’s exoskeleton, or the insect itself. And at what point exactly does the insect become fully detached from its exoskeleton?   –K. Weil