Fact: Co-Lab Space was among
my Top Ten Arts Picks for last year.
It was among those picks due to
the sheer amount of exhibitions –
about one every two weeks – mounted in
that small Eastside venue. And because
of the relentless experimentation
with objects and presentations,
the amount of work that venue director
Sean Gaulager & his friends put into
the year’s schedule of offerings.
Fact: Jamie Panzer’s solo show last year –
not at Co-Lab but at Big Medium –
was also among those Top Tens.
Because his “You see … Thing is …” was, well, what I said then.
Now here’s Panzer’s newest endeavor,
Bullshit Detector, at Co-Lab for a week.
It’s a show of one big piece, pretty much.
Although there are resonant paper collages by Panzer
on the walls of what you might call the lobby (or: airlock)
of Co-Lab, the main event in the main room
is that singular work called Bullshit Detector.
Look: There are three ziggurats barely visible
in the darkened room,
ziggurats like triple-tiered wedding cakes made from
piles of newly dug earth constrained by chicken wire,
each one at the point of some imaginary equilateral triangle.
You can smell the freshness of the dirt in the close air.
(“That’s from three days of digging,” says the artist,
grimacing at the memory of it. “There’s some manure in there.”)
Supported in the center of each of the ziggurats
is a wooden pylon that reaches to a height of maybe seven feet.
Each pylon is tipped with an eyelet screw.
In the center of the triangle defined by the ziggurats
is an electric generator; or maybe it’s just a terminal
that draws power from the Co-Lab walls; in any case,
there it is, at half the pylons’ height; and from this power-center
come lengths of wire, the kind that heats bread in toasters,
and these wires loop up and through the pylons’ eyelets.
The wires glow in the dark room, faintly buzzing, forming
the orange outlines of a geometric solid in mid-air.
“Nichrome wire,” says the artist. “That’s what it’s called.”
It’s like you’re co-existing in some virtual space
inhabited by one of the elements from the old Tempest arcade game.
Opinion: What a lovely, strange, and typically Panzerian structure to share a room with!
“It’s a pyramid,” breathes a visitor, staring at the bright wires.
“Well,” says the artist from deep shadows, “it’s a tetrahedron.”
For any tetrahedron, as you may know, there exists a sphere
such that the tetrahedron’s vertices lie on the sphere’s surface.
For any artist, we might add, there exists a sphere of influence.
And if there’s ever any lying going on on that sphere’s surface
… well, that’s what a good Bullshit Detector is for, isn’t it?
Bonus Fact: There’s going to be a closing reception for this show on Saturday, Feb. 25, 7-11pm.
This article appears in February 17 • 2012.