Joseph Keckler’s video installation Ghost Song (which can be viewed in its entirety here) describes an erotic encounter with a spirit that is made hilarious by the multiple layers of incongruous media Keckler uses to create the story. It is funny enough that the encounter — “I had sex with a ghost,” the subtitles plainly read — is described in ludicrous detail (“different poses, like elderly aerobics. My ghost was a body worker. I held my arms in the air like a lost raver”). Funnier still that, after a more traditional ghost story opening, Keckler conveys the story in Italian, sung as light opera. The more seriously he emotes, the funnier it gets.
Underneath the comedy, though, is a deeper point: that the meaning and tone of the story are changed by the way it’s told, and they are more malleable than it first appears. It’s appropriate, then, that Ghost Song is part of “[Voicings],” the exhibition running at Artspace at Orange and Crown now through April 15. Organized by Laurel V. McLaughlin, Artspace’s past director of curatorial affairs, with assistance from Visual Culture Producer Gabriel Sacco and Program Coordinator Steve Roberts, in addition to Keckler, the show has work from artists Mira Dayal, Dominique Duroseau, JJJJJerome Ellis, Nikita Gale, Gordon Hall, Amiko Li, Matt Keegan, Christine Sun Kim, and Sahra Motalebi. An accompanying statement explains that the show explores “the conditions, capacities, and powers of voices to utter sounds, words, and signs.” It’s “inspired by the numerous asides, coughs, stutters, glitched signs, and breaths from on-screen voicings and calling devices over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic — at a time when embodied voicings seemed rare if not impossible.” In the conception of the show, the voices represented in it “speak from the page in between brackets, live in the motion of fingers, the creaking positions of bodies, and the collective effort to shape language together.”
This tremulous description actually gets at something observable in the pieces themselves, which can be said to be about the difficulties of creating meaning. That last phrase, which on one level can sound a little too much like a late-night dorm-room conversation, has a very real adult version, which is that lurking among everyday facts that we see, feel, and know (the sky is blue, the sun comes up and down each day, inflation is eating into our paycheck) are a lot of concepts that prove to be complicated when you start examining them, and these complexities, especially when unexamined, have a way of driving social tensions and political problems. Some of those complexities are huge. How do we construct who we are? Can we really pin it down? How does history continue to affect us? Others are simply about the slipperiness of language. How many misunderstandings are created because people have different definitions of the same word in their heads — definitions that turn out to be at odds with one another? How many arguments happen because someone misinterprets another person’s tone of voice?
The pieces in the Artspace show operate at both of those levels. Mira Dayal’s sequence of pieces are words pulled from CAPTCHA tests, which numerous websites use to prove that the user is human. Dayal shows how, made separate from the test, the words are in fact sometimes even hard for humans to decipher. Deeper, the piece shows how the word can feel completely meaningless in this context. She echoes linguistic theory that reminds us that words are really just shapes, and nothing more. It’s our interpretation of them that gives them meaning — and therein lies the difficulty.
Nikita Gale’s LOCKED LUNGS distills the idea of the show almost down to its essence, as the elaborate contraption — a miniature record player, an amplifier, and a set of speakers — is all put to use to replicate the sound of someone breathing. It may seem overly complex at first, but of course actual human lungs are even more complicated than that. Millions of years of evolution came together to put that sound in the air, a sound essential to human life and also one that conveys no meaning beyond that.
Dominique Duroseau’s pressure treated softness is among the pieces that dive into the ways the slipperiness of language makes fraught societal problems even more fraught. A series of questions and provocations are etched into leather, stretched over steel with chains. “Define sexxxy,” one line reads. “Do you even know what sexy is?” The way the text corrodes on the surface echoes the way it’s actually much harder to answer Duroseau’s questions than it at first appears. For a word that people often use as if the meaning is obvious, the substance of that meaning can prove changeable, elusive. The words themselves becoming illegible also carries shades of the frustration that, in the end, it’s hard to work on issues like sexism and misogyny when real discussions about sex and desire and how we’re taught to understand those things are almost never had.
Meanwhile, JJJJJerome Ellis’s video installation Impediment is Information is a meditation on the artist’s personal identity and the legacy of history. As its launching point, it uses a notice from a 19th-century paper, in which a slaveowner is identifying people who have escaped his enslavement, in the hopes they will be returned to him. The artist pulls words out of that notice to make a poetic statement of his own, which he then juxtaposes with video images of a trip across a wide open wilderness, where he stops, regards the landscape, and sometimes plays music. The video makes an elegant point: the artist is clearly enjoys freedoms that the people running from enslavement did not have. But is he truly free? What outside forces hold him back? What ideas has he internalized, what ideas have been handed down to him, that keep him constrained? What does real freedom look like, and how do we know it when we see it? The meaning, as ever, is elusive. But it’s so important to keep looking.
“[Voicings]” runs at Artspace, 50 Orange St., through April 15. Visit the gallery’s website for hours and more information.