Sue de Beer’s hypnotic multimedia installation “The Ghosts” finishes its brief run at the Park Ave. Armory at 3:00 and 4:00 on Sunday
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Sunday, February 6, free, 3:00 & 4:00
347-463-5143
www.armoryonpark.org
www.suedebeer.com
Three years in the making following an elongated creative drought, Sue de Beer’s latest site-specific multimedia installation takes viewers on a mystical journey through the psychic corridors of dream, memory, and reflection. On view through Sunday at the Park Ave. Armory, the work includes several sculptures that supplement the centerpiece, “The Ghosts,” a two-channel video screened in the Veterans Room, complete with a large throw rug and eight silver bean-bag cushions (recalling her 2005 Whitney Altria piece, “Black Sun”) for people to lay on. The thirty-minute film follows a money manager (Jon Spencer of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion) who is obsessed with an occult hypnotist (painter and musician Jutta Koether), inspired by Italian giallo films, who practices “material recollection,” which “allows a patient to literally call forth a past event, to repeat a lost length of time, to revisit those things and people lost to absence, death.” The man feels he never achieved satisfying closure with an old girlfriend (Marissa Mickelberg), so he is attempting to reconnect with her through the hypnotist. The hypnotic, emotionally nuanced work features “persistence of vision” effects in which characters are ghosted and linger on-screen, kaleidoscopic images that echo the historic room’s stained-glass windows, text by frequent de Beer collaborator Alissa Bennett, a soundtrack with songs by Paul Simon, the Cure, Leonard Cohen, and John Lennon, and a rainbow and the fluffy white cat Snoebelle, both of which appeared in de Beer’s 2009 video “Sister.” De Beer, a Parsons and Columbia grad and NYU assistant professor who was raised in Salem, Massachusetts, and until recently shuttled back and forth between Berlin and New York, has also designed a praxinoscope that resides at the center of the armory’s Silver Room, showing an Antarctic glacier referenced in the film, while a large-scale painted plywood and steel sculpture casts eerie shadows in the Field & Staff Room. The final two screenings of the physically and psychologically satisfying “The Ghosts,” a project of the Art Production Fund, take place on Super Bowl Sunday at 3:00 and 4:00, to be followed shortly thereafter by de Beer’s “Depiction of a Star Obscured by Another Figure,” a solo exhibition running at Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea gallery from February 18 through March 19.