Press

Eye Candy

Richard Speer  ·  Willamette Week  ·  January 11, 2006

From 1998 to 2005, filmmaker Rob Tyler painstakingly hand-painted each of 15,000 frames of 16mm film, using acrylic paints, Magic Markers and fingernail polish to conjure swirling miasmas of seductive color. Each frame took an average of 30 minutes to complete, which gives you some idea of the artist’s utter obsession with the project, a limited-edition DVD titled Color and Modulation, currently showing at Center Space. At the show’s First Friday opening, various sections of the digitally manipulated film unfurled on 11 video monitors and a 10-by-15-foot projection screen as the ambient duo Unrecognizable Now played a live accompaniment track. Digital prints of freeze-frames hung on the walls, their working method reminiscent of avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, their imagery evocative of the Stargate sequence in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tyler's film and its pictorial offshoots recall—and handily dash—the old arguments about decorative, fine and cinematic art, and where to draw lines between them. The work is part of a movement that aims to turn today’s wildly popular widescreen and plasma TVs into vehicles for aesthetic contemplation. Tyler and other artist-designers such as colorcalm.com’s Robert Norton envision the high-resolution monitor not as a boob tube spitting out sitcoms and Fear Factor, but as a medium for mesmerizing progressions of form, color and motion. Bridging disciplines, Tyler has created a hauntingly beautiful work of art that sustains repeated viewings and invites metaphoric interpretation, even as it winks, whirls and flutters in gliding spools of pure, bravura eye candy.