Bricks and Bones Exhibition at the Prescott College Gallery.

 

San Francisco artist Tamara Albaitis is exhibiting a conceptual work at the Prescott College Art Gallery in the historic Sam Hill Warehouse, located at 232 N. Granite St. in Prescott. According to their statement, the Prescott College Art Gallery seeks to provide the Northern Arizona region with art exhibitions that aesthetically stimulate and critically engage viewers, as well as provide a diverse array of artists, emphasizing the domains of environment and social justice.

The show, titled Bricks and Bones, will run through March 24^thand features an interactive sound installation. The gallery area is entangled with wires, the wires of technology, and they enmesh the space with cobweb-like profusion. Above, in the gallery rafters, clots of black wires are massed about the timbers in a stuffed, hap hazardous way as though they were carried and deposited there by flood waters, and bodies of wires hang from the ceiling in disembodied masses.

Wires hang off the walls from disengaged stereo speakers and wires protrude through the walls, their tips uncoiled like metal root systems splayed open to the air and attached to nothing. The artist has randomly pounded small nails into white walls and then serendipitously connected some of the nails together with black wire. In the center of the gallery, a black, stereo speaker issues the sound of a heart beat and an audio track plays throughout the space. Various sounds of industry are heard, train whistles, cattle, the pounding of hammers, squeaking machinery, voices, crowds and murmurs.

The result is haunting and a bit unhinged. It's a perilous, disjointed world, well worth viewing, that aptly articulates the artists statement "I am interested in exemplifying a holistic understanding of our relationship to nature, not only on the biological and physical level, but also through complex socio-political stances that permeate the psychosis of who we are."