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Old 10-14-2002, 09:53 AM
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Exhibits explore radically different shades of voyeurism

BY ELISA TURNER





An image from Miami-based artist Ivan Toth Depena's 'Like Never Seems,' on display at Miami's Locust Projects through Oct. 26.


Video installations by London artist k r buxey and Miami-based artist Ivan Toth Depena, on exhibition this month at Miami's Locust Projects, could hardly be more disparate. One assaults the viewer with smarmy titillation, and the other magnifies dull urban and suburban moments into meditative landscapes of tense pleasure.

An avid collector of pornography, buxey has produced works culled from clips in her collection and created a piece that steals from porno close-ups with a coy enthusiasm. Body parts loom so close and blurry -- and in such messy red light in her video Negrophilia -- that assorted fleshy fissures and lumps are sometimes hard to identify.

Narrated voice-overs leave little to the imagination, however, as a white woman, speaking in short, explosive phrases, describes her lust for black men. The language is briefly abrasive. Then its shock value stretches into a threadbare, clichéd desperation, underscoring the limited impression made by the flashing imagery of intermingled figures.

Edward Weston photographed the seductive, if disorienting, hills and valleys of the human body with far more sensitivity years ago. By contrast, buxey's deliberately cheap-looking video comes up with precious little to offer on the subjects of race and gender politics.

Two other video installations, set up on cheesy hotel-room furniture, apparently aim to subvert the power plays and sexist macho orientation of standard skin flicks. But they, too, seem more desperate to shock than to provoke substantial thought.

Depena's Like Never Seems is a beguiling sequence of shots of bland one-story homes, a Miami Beach office building flickering with numbers indicating time and temperature, a lamppost poking through the treetops to shine with absurd brightness against an azure sky, and a gorgeous parade of lavender-tinted clouds massed above a modest row of Miami Beach apartments.

Each shot is shown for a few seconds, in forward and reverse motion, accompanied by a collage of electronic music that includes passages composed by the artist. There's a brief echo here of the rapidly flash-forwarded urban vistas by French video artist Pierre Pierre Huyghe. But, in Depena's work, the pulsing, insistent sounds also give an urgency to the passing landscape that at first seems so ordinary, and yet the artist gleans a compelling sense of geometry and an almost Edward Hopper-esque sense of loneliness from these sights.

A helicopter endlessly hovering in the blue sky and the lamppost gleaming in broad daylight suggest an insidious surveillance or voyeurism intruding on innocuous places, a timely reminder of the increasingly blurred boundaries between public and private spaces.

But what makes this piece especially arresting is the way it manipulates time to speed forward and backward, similar to instant replay or cinematic flashbacks in detective movies. These are devices often telling us to zero in on an essential detail, and yet Depena lures us into savoring the big, usually overlooked, picture.
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