ARTISTS
CHARLES LaBELLE
SELECTED PRESS
Charles LaBelle at Lawrimore Project Space, Art Lies, Summer 2008
Time is fleeting. Before you know it, a day has gone by- a year, an eon. Every day we march towards our certain demise, and there is poetry in this- in the common beat of life, the simple tick of seconds, the routines we perform day in and day out. This fusion- this melding of the poetic and the mundane- underscores Charles LaBelle’s Polis / Persona: Selected Video and Projected Works 1993 – 2007 at Lawrimore Project. Lawrimore, with its industrial location, pink exterior and well-planned interior, in some ways mirrors LaBelle’s work: the prosaic set again the ennui of urban life.
Upon entering the space, one is immediately confronted by 2001: A Space Odyssey, a video in which LaBelle taped every moment of himself behind the wheel of a car for an entire year. The recording- sped up- is projected on the fall wall. Facing the screen are a dozen iMacs displaying the varied cityscapes the artist passed through during the same time period. While fast food joints, bland strip malls and cheap motels stand unaltered, the artist ages rapidly, going nowhere fast- a year done in the blink of an installation.
Blind Trajectory, created in the mid 1990s, is another ambulatory gesture. A shaky camera follows LaBelle, blindfolded and wearing a chroma-key blue suit, as he stumbles through Thompkins Square Park in New York’s East Village and Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles- both major hubs for homeless populations at the time and thereby sites of confrontation and contested authority. As he meanders, people pass- some interested, some embarrassed, some paying no attention at all. While the artist may seem blind to the world, he is at the same time conspicuous and, most importantly, he creates a means to capture and reveal the “blindness” that surrounds us by navigating urban space in a purely intuitive way.
One of the most arresting pieces in the show is Traffic, a video of a super-8 film of a red balloon drifting down Sunset Boulevard projected onto a man’s bare chest. There is no sound save that of the projector and passing cars. The piece, like Albert Lamorisse’s seminal short film The Red Balloon, grows ever more melancholic. How will it pop? Will it get snagged by an antenna? Get run down by a speeding Pontiac? The certainty of its impermanence and fragility is emphasized by the background of flesh and bone rising and falling in time with the wayward balloon’s doomed trajectory.
The environment continues to play an important role in the impressive Red Venice Suite. A figure in a red hooded jacket walks through the empty streets of Venice in the early morning. We follow as he trundles down alleyways, over bridges, across streets and along sidewalks as Mahler swells in the background. Who is he? Where is he going? Will we ever see his face? Viewers must project their own thoughts and narratives and draw their own conclusions about who this person is and what he represents, if anything. It is the perfect conclusion to this exhibition- an elusive yet cohesive finish. The subject’s faced is obscured because he is just like us: we cannot see ourselves with our own eyes. We, too, trundle along the path of our lives until we reach the impregnable wall of mortality.
Jonathan Shipley