10 – 29 April 2013
Video Room, Finale Art File
(click on image for artwork details)
Random Collision
Mark Justiniani extends his forays into depth and time in Orbit, through works that continuously tread the course of his expansive interest in the configurations of space, the nature of vision and their ever vacillating relationship with time. From cavern to chamber, Justiniani troubles our perceptual field through perplexing dismantling of pictorial space. Track leads into a tunnel on a slightly skewed trail, a ‘slice of an orbit’ as the artist calls it, signifying transit or destination.
However, neither semblance nor echo of a stop is within our frame. As in Mimefield’s shaft, the terminal stop is elusive, even illusory. Indeed, if the sojourn is through an orbit we dare conjure terminus. Orbit strongly evokes the unknown, as chance prefigures enchanting discovery or morbid tragedy.
Justiniani captures two facets of time in this exhibition – the suspended moment eloquently illustrated in the turn the track makes in the installation and cyclical time evident in the unending rotations of two circular plates as well as the coin rotating on their surface. Halted time is discerned in Arrest, a make-shift clock ticking to stalled rhythm. Underlying the awry minute hand is resistance against the tide of time or insistence for time to unravel.
The disquiet and quandary evinced by Justiniani’s pieces somehow equal the blur as seen in Gerard Richter’s works. In Donald Kuspit’s terms, the blur is a temporal marker more than a spatial one “a trace of time rather than a measure of space”. In a world ordered by the exchange of abstract goods and shrunk more so by cybernetic frames, existence through time and within space can be understood through an ‘aesthetic of suddenness’, explained by Fredric Jameson as the “emergence of a new temporal form beyond history”. This existence relies on speed that can only be experienced through the body’s confinement.
It is not surprising then that the works’ deft presentation in enclosed frames (the boxed enclosure, the filmic frame, the unflinching face of a malfunctioning hour piece) allude to inhabiting temporal movement in a present strongly implored by Jameson’s analysis. It is a present forgetful even dismissive, of history fuelled and lured by breakneck speed, ultimately entrapped by boundaries that have become increasingly yet deceptively transparent.
—Tessa Maria Guazon