Review: Lindsay August-Salazar @ Private Places

NEW DIALECTIC MEMORIES
Lindsay August-Salazar

February 22–March 22, 2020
@
Private Places
2400 NE Holladay St.
Portland, OR

By Laurel V. McLaughlin

In the gallery, but after the performance. This was my temporal conundrum in viewing LA-based Lindsay August-Salazar’s exhibition NEW DIALECTIC MEMORIES on view at Private Places, Portland, OR, organized by Bobbi Woods. Earlier this month, August-Salazar and performers from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Janessa Bautista, Cristina Niculescu, and Kaitlyn Patrik, staged choreography amidst the translucent and holographic scroll installation [ACC Symbols] (scale, shift and follow), 2020 and digital video Zentei’s Pathless Path, 2020. The activation began and ended with the chiming of a tuning fork against a crystal, leaving left white archival gloves resting on the surface of the film. As documentation that I viewed later revealed, mitted hands and moving bodies translated a curious relational ciphering. 

August-Salazar’s practice probes the space between technology and embodiment through deconstruction and futural-oriented reconstruction. Slung across the Private Places gallery walls and floor, scrolls of refraction grading film are shot through with LED lighting and punctuated by glittery vinyl painted with notations. ACC signs, or Abstract Character Copies, as August-Salazar designated them, denote a choreographic language that orients viewer’s bodies materially, semiotically, and relationally. In the manner of other movement notations such as Rudolf Laban’s Labanotation, they read as characters, embodying experience across a variety of media including painting, annotative scores, performance, and an emerging font. At times, the characters in August-Salazar’s installation repeat in inversions, or re-emerge with additional arrows. Sometimes a sign is solitary and sometimes accompanied by others. Reading down, one wonders if perhaps one is meant to read up as well; and normative left to right scanning morphs into eyes roving both directions. Aside the crafted characters, other marks registered upon the filmic surface. Lines, fingerprints, and dust bore the indexical weight and touch of performers. They bent the film—already stretched across the floor and hanging from the ceiling—distilling light in riotous rainbows, shifting color in unexpected spectra. Eliding, transposing, and transforming, the movement of natural light in the industrial gallery space took flight. Serpentine lines with an arrow perhaps indicate movement, and sign spacing across the film perhaps renders bodily distribution within space. These contingent dialectics shift throughout the installation drastically based on one’s orientation in front, behind, or in-between the sheets of film. Viewers are invited to “scroll” their ways around and among the sheets, imprinting their own reflections, if only for a fleeting moment. It was as if one inhabited the space of a structural film, or stretched the capacities of expanded cinema. 

In a conversation with August-Salazar, she explained that “ever-shifting technology affects the architectures of neuroplasticity,” hence her engagement with scrolling—the seemingly simple gesture that enables access to myriad resources, but simultaneously embodies neoteric sensorial codes. Known for her paintings that position color, mark-making, and notational systems that defy the confines of the canvas, August Salazar’s [ACC Symbols] (scale, shift and follow), 2020 signals new grounds for experimentation—or “proposition,” as she calls it—in language, technology, materiality, and embodiment. Having studied movement with Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories of embodied sight, and image relations and film with Jim Welling, August-Salazar’s installation expands the formal languages and limits of performance, film, and painting through available technologies. The shifts and slips among the filmic paintings on the ground, the performance once there and extended in the viewer’s interaction, and the looping digital video Zentei’s Pathless Path, 2020, engender an intermedial potential. This potentiality occurs when the viewer reckons with both her embodiment via the characters and translucent film and a self-reflexive consciousness, questioning: how does my body inhabit technological codes of being? Are these choreographies extensive or intensive? How might the supposed “connectivity” implicit in the emerging tech landscapes of social media be oriented toward a bodily consciousness? The projected GIF video, Zentei’s Pathless Path, 2020 running in the corner and looping the charts of the ACC signs, recalls us to this consciousness in spurts and fits, while never removing us from the embodied experience. August-Salazar’s fingerprinted and dust-laden computer screen seen on the GIF overlay filters the ACC characters through the body and its residues at all times. Her title, referencing the Japanese word for premise or presupposition; Leih Tzu, the ancient Taoist teacher who queried the juxtaposition of the rational and irrational; and the concept of the “pathless path,” or the progressive inquiry into self-enlightenment, ensures that consciousness is never beyond the body’s sensorium. 

Moving through the amorphous installation, amidst the refracting light, my own body became incarnated upon the gleaming flesh of the film, performing its own inhabitation. As it shifted with the waning light, I could only imagine the potential of this transformative experience shared among fellow performers in an ACC language interpretive movement flow. But perhaps seeing it after the fact strangely deprogrammed me from a strictly performative analysis—removing the gloves from the experience, so to speak, or tuning myself anew to the multi-layered relationships among media and sensory experience that August-Salazar’s work inspires. 

NEW DIALECTIC MEMORIES runs through March 22nd at Private Places, 2400 NE Holladay St. Portland, OR 97232. Gallery hours are by appointment at http://www.privateplaces.us/about.