"Wake up, you're dreaming" is a mantra often prescribed for lucid dreaming, but they could just as well be the words of a helping hand during a nightmare, or the beginning of a guided hypnotic trance. As recalled by the artist Damon Zucconi, these words recently appeared in a post on reddit (that has since been taken down) as the first sentence of a terrifying existential print-out that was found in someone's desk on their first day of work. It continues with the sentence, "Your head is in the clouds and your body hangs below suspended by a single string of flesh," after which the text walks the line between curiosity and paranoia as the writer questions reality from within the limitations of corporeal meatware. Coming across this text at your new job would be understandably horrifying, and finding it on the internet, only to later see that it's been removed, signals a third-degree level of horror-genre spectatorship. Yet Zucconi took it as a starting point for what would become his dual-video exhibition, Neurofiction. Across two rooms at the gallery Various/Artists, Zucconi has created a space for viewers to question their relationship to his latest artwork and how they see (it).
Neurofiction greets you with a selection of five (out of 100+) unique industrial prints that present educational art-speak posing as optical illusions. In order to truly see these text-images, you have to look, read, and verify if the texts are accurate. Past these wall-hangings is the first of Zucconi's two videos in the exhibition, Jailbreak, which plays on a low and large screen angled like a confidence monitor, except that the viewer is left alone with only their thoughts rather than facing an audience. In the video, 18 flower arrangements in the style of vanitas memento mori paintings are starkly contrasted against the black background of a void, but while light and staging play in a way that evokes time-lapse footage, the truth is that no time is passing. Nothing progresses nor evolves, and every frame of the six-minute loop is a unique image differing in some small way from the others. Only the ethereal voice-over of synthetic choral voices approximate anything like a narrative as they sing the open captions, lifted from the disappeared reddit post.
In the gallery’s back room, Zucconi's 20-minute video Spatial Strobe takes viewers on a structuralist journey nowhere, one millisecond-frame at a time. Using a first-person perspective, the video rapidly moves amongst the ruins of abandoned urban buildings like cinemas and malls. There is neither talking, nor people—two rules Zucconi had for himself when choosing and editing the footage. Although multiple found videos were cut together to create Spatial Strobe, and each one is moving forward chronologically, they're shown by the order of each frame's luminosity. A "slow strobe into darkness," as Zucconi called it. The same hopeless anxiety that exists when watching a ghost-hunting horror film is embedded in Spatial Strobe, except that there is no narrative here, just a rapid flicker of visual information that forces you to consider whether you've seen each shot before and if you can tell where the camera is taking you. Or, what you're running from in the video’s neglected and decrepit world? The loss of agency while watching the video is arresting, hypnotic, and addictive.
Neurofiction is currently on view through October 5 at Various/Artists.
