Brian Doyle - Between the Currents

“Between the Currents” is a film installation comprised of two large projections on opposite sides of a boarded up rectangular office space. The viewer is caught in an echo between two films, “Current” and “Current (Reprise)”, each around 6 minutes, which alternately illuminate either side of the room. The films document two ticker-tape parades in New York City, the last before 9-11 in 2000 and the first after in 2008.

A mirror-like coda to “Current”, “Current (Reprise)” picks up where the last film left off - at ground zero amidst a storm of communication in a metropolis without people. Radio towers, satellite dishes, and helicopters seem to monitor or perhaps even propel the storm. Reams of paper explode, slice, and float through the air. Ultimately, this information made manifest drifts through unpopulated streets like tumbleweeds of spent human communications. The city is consumed, erased by a blanket of information.

The installation challenges the role of technology and information in modern times, while questioning notions of place and history through direct observation of the landscape. The viewer inside “Between the Currents” is caught between two seminal events of history – the destruction of the World Trade Center and the global financial crisis. Yet the immediate effect is to be removed from time, suspended in a nearly spontaneous assembly of chaos, flinging symbolic information into the wind in a rite of dizzying generalized glorification.

Auction:
"Between the Currents" is now on sale on Artnet as a part of the Peekskill Project V.
The two channel installation and a single channel version are available from now until April 30, 2013. View the auction for the install here and video here.

Exhibition:
Peekskill Project V, 417 Main St. Peekskill, NY
Sept. 29 - Dec. 9, 2012, Saturdays and Sundays 1-4pm, or by appointment

Generous support provided by 303 Gallery, New York; Worldstage, Scharff Weisberg; and Westchester Community College Center for the Digital Arts, Peekskill Extension.

This work is dedicated to my father, Dennis Doyle, 1939-2012.