REVIEW OF KAREN CASEY’S ART OF MIND: PART ONE: MEDITATION IN ALPHA (2004)

Karen Casey: Art of Mind (2004) Reproduced with kind permission of the artist.

Midway through the cult sci-fi film Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001), Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) sees billowing wormholes emanating from the solar plexus of his body and those of his family. These wormholes, which appear to have energy of their own, trail off from the bodies, plotting the person’s path from room to room. Donnie is of course the only person who can see these perceptual aberrations, and so we conclude that he is hallucinating or that there has been a crack in the time space continuum, which allows the unseen connections between people to be revealed to him.

Likewise at the end of the film Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997), Ellen (Jodie Foster), the main protagonist is plummeted in her space craft (designed from an alien source), from one space-time continuum into another, via wormholes that form interconnecting tunnels across the vast universe. After traveling at dizzying speeds, she encounters more wormholes that slingshot her into another trajectory until she finally rests on what she perceives as another planet, where she is greeted by an aberration of her dead father.

Wormholes are often depicted in science fiction films as an instantaneous form of travel from distant points in outer space. As portals they represent our first entry into the world. The wormholes in Donnie Darko are strange attractors, metaphorical umbilical cords that connect family members and in Contact they allow Ellen to transcend time and space. Both films suggest a genetic or historical connection between material and non-material plains of existence. In these films reality itself is questioned as well as the protagonist’s spiritual search for something greater than themselves.

This spiritual desire to connect with something greater and to expose the unseen or unknown is suggested in Karen Casey’s latest work Art of Mind, Part One: Meditation in Alpha (2004) in which the terrestrial and celestial is invoked. The portals in Casey’s earlier works are displaced in this animation as wormhole forms that evolve from a trailing sphere, eventually morphing and incorporating into a larger animated ground that forms ripples that pulse and throb. Equally the blue and white spheres on the black background evoke images that we are familiar with of the planet Earth viewed and photographed from space. There is a feeling whilst watching these ever moving shapes that something is in the process of evolving. In the second cycle, the forms resemble bio-luminescent ocean creatures and at other times they display the color and energy of volcanic lava. In the final cycle the forms morph into hundreds of overlapping ripples that touch and converge, expanding and dissolving. Soft earthy textures throb and quiver in concert with one another. The images melt into a dark shallow rock-pool and transform again into wormhole structures. The cellular morphing suggests a privileged view of the evolution of biological entities enabled by advanced imaging technologies. Casey’s affective work, with its wormhole-like forms and serene aqueous landscape evokes one particular scene in Contact, in which space and time are exposed as a property of mind, since the planet on which Ellen stands is exposed as a permeable liquid screen. In Art of Mind, Casey’s inhalation and expiration of breath, forms part of the soundtrack alongside dripping water. As signifier of life, breath and water stands in marked contrast to the artificially constructed images.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the images in this exhibition are just simply the product of clever animators, whereas they have been generated from Casey’s own alpha brain waves. The animations are a particular coalescence of mind, technology and creative intervention. With their sudden quiver and consistent movement the landscape images take on a liveliness usually associated with living forms. In one case the vista mirrors fissures on the surface of the human brain or indeed desert sands carefully sculptured by shifting winds.

Art of Mind, Part One: Meditation in Alpha is a modest exhibition. Tucked away in small dark room on the left-hand side as you enter RMIT Gallery, it might be missed except for the still image on a television monitor of Casey - eyes closed, wearing the EEG headset, which recorded her electronic brain signals. It is this image that links Casey’s alpha waves to the animation and suggests in some way that she is a willing neuronaut entering into a strange encounter with the unknown recesses of her own mind. Art of Mind: Part One, Meditation in Alpha is powerful in its quiescence, because it literally suggests by the somewhat cellular constructs and evolving forms that the work is in its infancy. The title of the exhibition itself suggests that we should consider the relationship between art and speculative science.

Julie Clarke, December 2004

See some of the images from Karen's exhibition at:http://www.karencasey.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8&Itemid=9