IT’S A TESTAMENT to Disjecta Curator-in-Residence Rachel Adams’ range that this fall’s Intimate Horizons is followed by Sightings, a collection of video installations from Jessica Mallios and Kevin Cooley. While Intimate Horizons featured Claire Ashley’s colorful, balloon-like, almost humanoid objects, Mallios and Cooley’s video installations challenge what we ordinarily expect from video art and photography, the works’ pointed coolness the polar opposite of larger-than-life sculpture.
Named for San Antonio’s 750-foot rotating observation tower slash restaurant (where it was filmed), Mallios’ “Tower of the Americas” is an ode to Steadicam. Her camera remains static while the tower circles, providing a disorienting look at the city. But the camera’s real focus is the smudges, scratches, and raindrops on the glass in between the camera and its subject, writ giant in the camera’s focus, like imperfections blown up hugely on a filmstrip—in effect, the Tower’s window becomes a smudged lens, captured through a clean one.
Photography is a medium historically well suited to hiding your tracks: Even pre-Photoshop, when an image emerged interrupted by dust spots and scratches, the painstaking next step would be to fill them in with exactly the right shade of dark ink. So to see a video in which imperfections aren’t a distraction but the subject—especially of something this precisely made—is destabilizing and unexpected.