Buffalo Super Friends

LAST PROJECT: 'TERMINUS'

Terminus is an ongoing site-specific installation project combining multiple synced projections and multi-channel spatial sound. Terminus was first commissioned for Hallwall’s 2007 group show, ‘Nocterminal’, held in Buffalo, New York’s derelict central train terminal—an amazing structure, on the scale of NYC’s Central Station, abandoned now for 30 years. The goal of Terminus was to address this confrontation in the central station between the extinct passageway of the liminal space of travel, and the temporal passageway of living and decaying that was embodied in the station. Three huge screens, arranged in spatial dialogue with eachother, displayed looping 16mm projections of imagery that evoked nostalgia, the fleshly real, and the natal passage of birth. Huge belly buttons undulated and invited the viewer in to an underwater fantasy world of remembered travel. A stereo soundscape combining four channels that oscillate through divergence and coincidence, intelligibility and unintelligibility surrounded the viewer. This space, installed in the opening reception area of the terminal, had to be traversed by every visitor, picking between these luring passageways their own entrance to the show.

FUTURE INSTALLATIONS OF 'TERMINUS'

Because Terminus was a site-specific installation, the goal is to now tour this installation in the art gallery, re-configuring its arrangement so as to evoke the space of transportation once present. Terminus will be installed as a corridor that has to be traversed, using 3-channel synced video projection and multi-channel audio soundscapes, becoming a literal line-of-flight projecting out of it’s rust-belt origins. Participants walk through this passage as they would a long hallway. Four video images form one seamless wall of the passageway, while the audio projects out. The audio content forms four distinct spatial areas for the participant to pass through. Standing like soldiers… a gauntlet that has to be passed… but undulating, and luring in… like Gary Hill’s ‘Tall Ships’. The black and white imagery evokes family histories of photographs, as if looking at your grandma’s belly-button, and toys with ideas of nostalgia…. Toy-trains existing in a floating fantasy space… it is a childhood and history only in the abstract—the childhood of television. The installation may be nostalgic; but not for the past, and therefore it is not a sentimental nostalgia… it is nostalgic for the future, for the returning possibility of fantastical travel that was once imagined as a child. The HD realism of the fleshy belly-buttons challenges this nostalgia… there is something external and real about them… they are distinctly possible… and disturbing. The sound fields projected out create separate spatial fields that have to be traversed… evoking travel, destinations, fantasy, and the fleshy internal.

The Buffalo Super Friends are:

Leah Rico, Jamie Currie, Alan Rhodes, and Chris Ernst

contacts: Alan Rhodes, garhodes@garhodes.com; 647.341.6058 / 716.316.8210

Chris Ernst, audioptics@sculptureman.com; 716.480.0990

Leah Rico, leahrico@yahoo.com

Jamie Currie, jcurrie@buffalo.edu