Some thoughts on the art show “Parallax”

by Bob Henriquez

 

According to Frederick Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man, joy is felt when we recognize our own

creativity as play, play among the contingencies of life. Such is the playfulness one can enjoy on viewing

Mark Soderstrom's work, “Parallax,”  now showing at the gallery on campus at Humboldt State University. 

His title derives from how a change in perspective can appear to change the world itself.  Each of Mr.

Soderstrom's works in this show has written below it a rich and lengthy text which both explains and shifts the

understanding of the work: the writing may describe its origins, means of its production, or  often an ironic

invitation to the viewer on how it can be used apart from its original “purpose.” None are paintings on canvas

as such, but rather are modifications on found objects.  Thus Mr. Soderstrom juxtaposes the 'thingness-of-the-world'

with the 'thing-as-it-appears,' and it is this parallax, this twinned image,that inspires in the viewer a meditation

on the very stuff of artistic experience.

 

Mr. Soderstrom mines the trove of his personal as well as our collective memories to engage us in an invitation to

play.  He begins his work with something of a myth of his artistic origins: a double exposed photograph of the

sun on the ocean is shown to us with its text telling us that he had thought as a child for years that he had actually

photographed a doppelganger sun, hiding next to the original, that only his magic camera could detect.  From

there we can step off into a world where the coinage and counters of meaning that we use to get through our days

are devalued in a floating exchange.  We are left to discern the meanings left if we were to entertain the

hypothesis of 'automatic writing,' where a oija-like pen has scibbled various images.  The artist creates an emblem

to the fruitful fractures of his memory by making a double-pronged hypodermic needle. When I stood before his

reliquary to a child's toy magnet, my own revery drew me into the imaginary town of Macondo, where Jose

Arcadio Buendia celebrated the day the gypsies demonstrated the miraculous forces of a magnet to mud-splattered,

mean little lives.  Mr. Soderstrom creates a realm that visually rivals the playful seriousness of Garcia Marquez's

magical realism.

 

Mr. Soderstrom's works include invocations to the idiosyncracies of other individuals and even to our collective

psychoses.  What appears to be a bandalero of bullets turns out to be a leather shoulder harness with multiple glass

vials of dew, based on a midevalist's theory that we can physically rise like the dew if we wear it.  A briefcase

filled with packages of cocaine is rendered “invisible” to Customs officials because it also carries the vibratory

powers of the mind-shattering book, 'Dianetics.'  In a particularly striking work, a politically demarcated globe is

blackened and all the names are covered by a censor's pen; surrounding the globe are carefully framed Rorsach

inkblots of  what we imagined were indivdual territories, with individual boundaries :  we are left to muse on our

own inevitable processing of these shapes-as-locations (“what is it? Oh it is Nebraska. And that? Oh, it must be

Japan... or it it Phillipines?”)  How we impose a utility on our perceptions will alter the thing and then double

back to skew our perception of it.  A Pennsylvania Dutch “Hex” is painted on the wall and we are invited to

think about its putative magic powers. The spoons and beaver traps made and sold for sustenance by the radical

19-th century Oneida collective are re-crafted by Mr. Soderstrom into cultural artifact.  In a further twist on the

spiral of reification, he displays the co-modification and packaging of artistic product: first with a tender tribute

to human suffering-- pharmaceutical bottles with such healing medicinals as the innocent tears of a child, then

more cynical and mercenary – numbered, autographed blank sheets of 'palimpsest,' which the viewers are

invited to purchase and mark up on their own.

 

Of final interest-- and perhaps a conundrum which I cannot quite fathom - is the fragment that I learned that

Mr. Soderstrom felt obliged to collect for his projects “authentic” child's tears, dew, and automatic writing for

his works.  Was this naivete, good advertising, or a basic trust in a true, hard and good world that we can reach

if only we unravel further, unhurriedly and in good humor, the human distortions of our world?