James Lane | Alluvium / Αλλούβιο | Video presentation of the performance Dionysus' Mirror, 2011.

Exhibition duration: February 8th – 23th, 2011
Exhibition Hours: Mon - Fri, 2-9 pm; Sat 2-6 pm
Free Entrance

James Lane,"Dionysus' Mirror", 2011, (4min, video)
www.jamesmlane.com

The work of the Greek-American visual artist James Lane constitutes a 'deconstruction' of photography, which used to be his main medium. After an absence of almost ten years from the Greek art scene, during which he worked hard and pursued his artistic quests, Lane (who has studied at Parsons School of Design and School of Visual Arts in New York and at the University of Massachusetts) returns to the Beton7 Gallery with some of his latest work. Using photomechanical media (such as image scanners) whose outcomes require further digital processing, the artist resorts to humble objects to create unique visual worlds.
The allusion to 'the end of photographic representation', is a quasi-psychoanalytical reading of family history (the artist comes from a family of painters and art historians) and what he describes as a renewed approach to the ancient Orphic cosmogony and the worship of Dionysus are the cornerstones of this new body of work.
The works are like membranes created as vision touches upon a natural material (a drop of water that evaporates, the dust that settles on a lens over time, a photo album from the family archive) to depict imperceptible everyday microcosms. Conceptually linked with the early techniques for reproducing plants (typographia naturalis), as used by 18th-century naturalists like Kniphof, the works also reference Talbot's early steps in photography as well as the modernist 'photograms' of Man Ray.
On a conceptual level, the salts of water and the photographic dust function similarly to the silver salts that form the photographic image (i.e. the grains that carry the pictorial information). The term alluvium in the title of the show describes the creation of new soil by sediments near the mouth of the river. This symbolic reference to the passage of time and the memories associated with it constitutes an allegory for life itself on an organic level, for art or for one's personal life. For instance, in a sound installation in the show, the artist appears engaged in a filing procedure which is accompanied by the observation of ice in the process of melting.
At the same time, Lanes’ works function like mirrors, both literally and metaphorically as they are printed on mirror surfaces in which the viewer is also reflected in some cases. They also resemble masks, the personae in Dionysian drama. The mask in ancient drama combined one's two identities, the physical and the transcendental, and acted as 'the gateway between two worlds of experiences'. The artist's work invites us on a metaphysical reflection in favor of the transcendental, using the one technical medium which is associated more than any other with the documentation of tangible things and the world of the senses: the photographic document.

So like a modern-day pagan, Lane urges us to reflect upon the meaning of 'truth'. Indeed, the water he uses in one of his works, A-letheia (Truth), is a drop from the spring of Lethe (Oblivion) at the Oracle of Zeus Trophonius in Livadeia, while the droplet in another work comes from the spring of Mnemosyne (Remembrance) at the same Oracle, which was consulted by people from all around the Roman Empire (among them Pausanias, in whose Description of Greece the strange things that occurred there are described in detail).
Thus in Lane's work the Dionysian darkness of the chthonic Orphic rites is equated with the gloom of the photographic darkroom (but also with the subjective, unconscious gloom in each of us), and the passage from one to the other requires the 'violent' tearing apart of the camera and its resurrection (both literally and metaphorically). Just as in the myth of Dionysus Zagreus the God is torn apart to be reborn, in the artist's performance on the opening night of the exhibition the camera is taken apart and only the old film in it survives—like the heart of Dionysus in the ancient myth. The camera obscura acts also like a sarcophagus. The process of rebirth is identified with memory and artistic innovation, although the issue of 'truth', which has preoccupied theoretical thought for so long, remains in Lane's show as the key philosophical 'question' upon which the viewer is called to reflect upon.

James Lane was born in Athens, but lived in the US during the late 80s’ and early 90’s. He studied photography at Parsons School of Design in New York and Ecole Parsons in Paris, France. He has presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Athens, New York, Paris, Madrid, Seoul and St. Petersburg. James Lane works with photography, computer imaging, multi-media and video and audio installations. He lives and works between Athens and New York.