Innuendo Non Troppo by dint of Gregory Barsamian The Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati.

Innuendo Non Troppo by dint of Gregory Barsamian The Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Ohio September 5-November 1 1998

Gregory Barsamian's art is united of synchronicity and illusion. Reviving and elaborating upon the form of the nineteenth-century zoetrope "innuendo Non Troppo" contains nine works, six of which were especially created for the exhibition and not previously exhibited. In the original zoetrope images lined the inside of a cylinder. While the device spins rapidly, the viewer lords through carefully placed slits forward the side of the cylinder to perceive a sequential motion. Unlike the nineteenth-century version in which the viewer remains outside the device, Barsamian's sometimes room-sized zoetrope affect the viewer's entire environment. His large, whirling armatures combine with stroboscopic lights to create dream-like successions of movement, using tiny figures, toys and other uses attached to armatures as well as shadowy images cast forward the wall.

At first collision the work is overwhelming, flat confusing. Set in a strobe-lit darkness, each sculp occupying its own space, Barsamian's narratives use condens imagery from his avow dreams to explore the uncanny. Combining an interest in Jungian psychology and Nietzschean world-building, Barsamian uses open-end suggestive imagery that directly challenges viewers to create their confess interpretations. Reading the work is repeatedly tricky, as meaning seems to lie just below the surface. Barsamian's necromancy of dreams posits time as the same locus of anxiety since it is ultimately beyond our command This is reflected by the curious feeling that many of his narratives can be read backward as well as foreword.

For example, in Copraphagia (1991) in which a wad of newspaper rend asunders into a room from the rear to chase a new dog turd, the paper and the dejections seem locked in a dance. The dance metaphor appears again in brace Step (1997), in which a photograph of a two is torn in two and as individual half floats to the country it rolls into itself to form a glass of milk, spills public and reforms into the original half of the photo to fitting its twin at the base of the carved work As repetition is intrinsic to the zoetrope's design, the narrative always recurs to the exact place from which each succession began.

Barsamian's kinetic carves fill each room with the unhurt of machinery, and are sometimes accompanied by means of an atmospheric musical soundtrack. Like cinema, the work demands constant attention; I place myself studying the shrouded figure encircled at hands in No, Never Alone (1997) approaching it from different angles, trying to discern exactly what was happening. Sometimes, as in Dipping Digits (Always wins Wet) (1991), where hands dipping into a page of paragraph scoop out a tiny salamander that scurries away, the illusion come to one's minds so quickly that I wanted to moderate the piece down and apply the mind at it step by step

The technical mastery involved with the organization and mechanics of Barsamian's work is impressive further some of his images are more compelling than others. For example, in Putti (1991) where angels' wings morph into cross-hatched helicopter blades and in Orphan (1998) where a crumpl newspaper becomes a teddy bear, the disturbing and resonant images are accomplished with minimal means that land somewhere between "The awe-inspiring World of Disney" and Apocalypse Now. In another engaging piece entitled Cake Walk (1997) a figure appears in the devoid of contents space left by a slice remov from a cake. The figure be augmenteds until it is suddenly flattened from a truck.

These pieces are the strongest in the exhibit to because of their sophisticated in addition simple condensation of images. so condensations were recognized by Sigmund Freud as creations of a greatly divided psyche and Barsamian's work points in the same direction. While the audience was more vocal and outwardly inquisitive about the more elaborate pieces, (making the present to view seem as much like a science fair as an art exhibit), what mov me more was Barsamian's ability to crystallize unstable dualities so as the hell-cherubs and trash-toys. Poised between motion and stillness, the familiar and the bizarre, this unique medium have the appearances especially suited to represent the gray area of the dream state in which float nightmarish visions of glee that inhabit an active mind.

MARIA TROY is an associate curator of media art at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio. She is also a contributing editor of P-Form Magazine.

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