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Portraits retain power to dazzle the eyeBy Robert J. Pincus Maybe they appeal to the narcissist in all of us, but the human fascination with portraits seems inexhaustible. Even when we know little about the person in the picture, if the likeness is strong enough the fascination doesn't fade... ...But it's not only the painted portrait that can collapse time. Jump to the present and you will find Lincoln Schatz, an artist from Chicago, doing much the same in some unusual video works on view at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla (through Dec. 31). He compresses time quite literally in works like "Me Me You Me" and "Path." Stand before his flat screens and you're in the picture, generally more than once. He divides the screen into overlapping rectangles and overlapping images that appear closer and farther away from you - some containing faces and some not. Along with your image, pictures of others who are not in the gallery space appear and disappear on the screen. It's clear they were there minutes, hours or days ago, but any distinct sense of past and present dissolves. All at the time, Schatz is documenting the present, showing snippets from the past and continuously turning both into video compositions. It's art in constant flux. Schatz is clear, in a brief written statement for his exhibition, that he has big ambitions for the time frame of a given piece: "Events from minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years past form interwoven layers played out at varying opacity and speeds on a plasma screen." It's both entertaining and disorienting to spend some time in front a piece by Schatz. The instant portrait of you exists in a virtual universe in which time has become elastic. He calls his exhibition "Collision." But that doesn't seem quite the term for it: The recorded moments and people don't collide so much as overlap and co-exist. © 2005 San Diego Union-Tribune |