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Conducting Silence

“The film [Conducting Silence] has been slowed, transforming the conductor's sweeping movements into a ghostlike tai chi … On an opposing screen, an ephemeral shimmering image of the conductor's arms appears as beating wings."

Marilyn Bauer,
Art Writer
The Cincinnati Enquirer

In order to make this video, Russel Hulsey filmed the Associate Conductor of the Louisville Orchestra, Robert Franz, conducting the symphony Asrael by the Czech composer Josef Suk (1874-1935). Asrael is an ambitious work that mourns the death of the composer’s father-in-law and wife. After filming, Hulsey proceeded to remove the original music and replaced it with a new synthetic soundtrack.

By slowing the film down very slightly, Hulsey is able to concentrate our vision upon the delicate balance that Franz’s body achieves, almost as if he were practicing Tai Chi. Equally, this process emphasizes the sweeping effect, like brush marks, of Franz’s body as he moves across the screen. Suggesting a heavenly angel, the blurring image of the conductor’s arms as he moves to the music, takes on the look of beating wings. Hulsey reinforces these effects with a soundtrack that is highly atmospheric, as if creating an ethereal pulse for the physical movements of his subject. In turn, and as a result of the type of screen that Hulsey projects the image onto, Franz’s movements become ghost-like reflections on the back wall of the projection space. Like an apparition, this light form shimmers, transforming a work whose sources relate to melancholy and darkness into an affirmation of hope.

Julien Robson,
Curator of Contemporary Art
Speed Art Museum

Continuum

In creating this video, Russel Hulsey filmed Sara Cooke, a young girl born in Spain and now living in the United States with her family.  She personifies the embodiment of the youthful being, an early innocence.  Cooke’s performance represents a beginning and a willingness to embark upon travel and passage.  Thus, presenting Continuum as an affirming declaration of hope. 

Hulsey has slowed the film down to one-half speed.  In doing so, he focuses our attention upon the young girl’s repetitive movement or revolutions, resulting in a meditative and trance-like effect that causes the viewer to contemplate symbolic references, use of metaphor and depth of meaning.  Cooke represents humankind and allows us to call upon our personal histories, back to a time when we stood barefoot outside on a pleasant summer day and spun in circles until we fell to the ground from having become too dizzy, not painful, we laughed in our clumsy, spiral decline.  Hulsey links these ideas of youth, freedom and personal memory to the eastern philosophical and esoteric practice of the Whirling Dervish found in Sufism.  This Sufi ritual has been practiced since the 1200’s and is meant to “blur time and space,” it is a way to which one can shed the self-ego.  Clad in white, the dervishes spin delicately in a circular fashion as if they were planets revolving around the sun.  Their whirling is both accompanied and complimented by an ethereal music that is played during the ceremony.  The folds of their white garments extend due to centrifugal force, emphasizing their movement; the basic concept is that wherever one turns, they shall see the face of their creator.  While Hulsey has no call for incorporating religion into Continuum, he does achieve a common philosophical ground.  In today’s technologically driven world, we are moving at a dizzying pace, Hulsey shifts our attention to the need to slow down and to reflect upon our place in our time.  By use of a holographic TransScreen, Hulsey projects a symbolic representation into the cycle of birth, life and passing.  Continuum’s notion is a never-ending signal to which we owe a debt of positive responsibility to future generations.

Endless Nameless

The Scopic Series

Tiny technology is positioned directly onto the floor to feature one-inch-tall human beings struggling, in a land of giants (the viewers), to have their voices heard.  This micro to macro ratio functions as a contemplative metaphor designed to generate an intended social commentary.  Often, members of society are met with great opposition, and must struggle to have their voices heard.  Scopic directs our attention to those who simply need to be recognized.  The artwork physically draws the experiencer into the realm of voice, requiring us to listen.

Land (after Woody Guthrie)

exhibition review, excerpt:
“It is telling that the most engaging work, ‘Land (after Woody Guthrie)’, is the one work among [other] more visible works that, initially, is the most easily overlooked. In ‘Land’ the tiny figure of a young man wistfully, fretfully, happily sings Guthrie's achingly honest national anthem alternative, ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ The tiny [LCD screen] is set casually on the floor with sound low enough to make you stoop.”

Diane Heilenman,
Art Critic
The Courier-Journal

Seeking, designed as a multi-faceted video installation,makes reference to a Japanese Shinto shrine or a place of meditation found in the practice of Zen Buddhism.  Yet, in this situation, the artist has created a setting in which the television is the focus of meditation.  The screen is illuminated with a single phosphorescent word that has been encoded into a sequence of abstract markings through a process known as vertical deflection.  By scanning ones’ eyes, from the markings on the screen to the reflected markings in the mirror below (in a sweeping motion, up and down), the horizontal hold opens for a split second to reveal the letters T R U T H as a form of subliminal encoding.  This suggests that the media, being an “influence machine” and the television, itself, as an object of “idol worship” are habitually relied upon for ultimate truths by the masses of contemporary culture.  In spite of this, the truth is often abstracted through media filtration, consequently, societies’ critical task is to interpret and to seek-out fact from fiction.

As we venture further into the digital domain of the 21st Century there is a distinct feeling that we, as human beings, are becoming more and more powerful.  This power and its manifestation – technology – are inherently linked.  It may even be stated that we consider these powerful techno-advancements to be extensions of our own bodies and our “being-ness” in this world.  As we move further from the organic and become more deeply imbedded into the synthetic there is an innate tendency to strive for perfection – our highest ideal.

Why don't you all f-fade away
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
And don't try to dig what we all s-s-say
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation
(Talkin' 'bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Author: Pete Townshend
originally recorded by The Who, 1965

Verses pay homage to the great 19th Century poets: Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry W. Longfellow.

Song to Thoreau (Verses, no. 1)
Song to Dickinson (Verses, no. 2)
Song to Emerson (Verses, no. 3)
Song to Whitman (Verses, no. 4)
Song to Longfellow (Verses, no. 5)

The Shift Series

“When Hulsey and [videographer] Kowalewski push the [Shift series] video up in scale, past the TV screen size into a scale that physically envelopes the viewer, it does deepen into a mysterious medium where up-and-down, in-and-out reality itself is compromised ... ” 

Diane Heilenman,
Art Critic
The Courier-Journal

Russel Hulsey set out to create an abstract expressionist “digital painting” of the Louisville, Kentucky night-time cityscape or skyline as it is reflected on the dynamic, ever-changing, surface of the Ohio River.  Although the finished product is not a painting at all, it exists upon knowledge of art history: the “experimentation with light on water surfaces” as located within Claude Monet’s Impressionistic work, the Minimalist “color field” paintings of Mark Rothko, and the Abstract Expressionist “action painting” style of Jackson Pollock, or the abstracts of Gerhard Richter, all provide the groundwork for Shift.  The intrinsic drive for the artist throughout time has been to creatively interpret his or her inward sense of self and outward sense, with relation to, the surrounding world.  This “drive” has not changed much in the 21st Century.  However, the tools used to interpret these worlds are now vastly different, and perhaps more complex.  The key difference between Contemporary Artists (like Hulsey) and the aforementioned Impressionists, and so forth, of the past is simply put – time and technology.  Contemporary artists use and often re-purpose the given technologies of the present in order to advance the creative processes of art-making, and to continue the artistic tradition of innovatively expanding the inexhaustible frontiers of the human imagination – with its intrinsic link to the natural world.  In Shift, the artist is interested in the interaction and/or intersection between the “human-made” (city lights) and the “organic” (river).  This video-artwork is in effect a “digital painting.”  It is intended to provide the viewer with an ambient and contemplative framework with which to enjoy the subtlety and beauty of the aesthetic surface while simultaneously providing a mechanism that promotes meditation upon the environment, and its interconnected human presence. With Shift,Hulsey poses certain questions; how is it that we are apart of the natural world rather than a part from it?  How do we interact with it; and, how might we work to preserve it for future generations?     

The artist states: I was born and raised in Kentucky, and this place and its inhabitants have had a profound affect upon my life, my values, and my art-making process.  Ultimately, I hope this particular work provides people with an inner sense of reflective quitetude and a celebration of The Rivercity, that is, Louisville, Kentucky, a place rich in culture and tradition.  It is my intention that this work be distinctive; yet, somehow retain a certain sense of ambiguity.  This is achieved by focusing attention upon a specific place – The Rivercity – so that we may come to celebrate it from an external “folk perspective.”  Further, by abstracting the city’s physical skyline, Shift points to a more universal perspective that encourages a deeper appreciation for our internal sense of being,that in and of itself stretches beyond the specificity of a particular place.  In this manner, Shift no longer retains the identity of a specific locale, rather, it becomes an allegory for the flow of energy that is life itself.  The reflection of the city represents us –the face of humanity – as we exist in time, dancing on the surface of a deeper and more mysterious streaming current.  Insomuch as we experience it, life seems to function as an ever-voyaging quality of perpetual shift.  I feel that the river is a perfect metaphor for this dynamic.

Text excerpted, in part, from an interview conducted by:
Amy Barnes,
The Courier-Journal

Deflection Works

“He made this series because he believes human interaction is necessary in art.  ‘Without this critical interplay, Art itself has no purpose, no meaning, no life, it does not exist,’ [Hulsey] said.”

Jo Anne Triplett
Visual Arts Editor,
LEO

Deflection Works (complete list)

Mother, 2001
Origin (after Gustave Courbet), 2001
Seeking, 2002
ZERO, 2003
Reading Between The Lines, 2005
And All Around Me A Voice Was Sounding, 2005
He Made Salt, 2007

Mother

“A single image appears in unfamiliar surroundings – a flat line on a television screen placed in a museum – to unsettle us from our complacency.  The viewer may not relax but must function as a part of the machine to find the condensed information … emphasizing our reliance on the boob tube for information and stimulus.”

Leslie Millar,
Art Writer
LEO

Mother incorporates an imaging process known as vertical deflection, which [may sometimes be] referred to as "flicker-persistence." The process is accomplished internally within the television monitor by altering the vertical hold mechanism. The image, which still exists in full capacity, is compressed into a 1⁄4-inch band of light that stretches horizontally. The incoming, condensed video is then reflected upon a mirrored surface in order to double the image. This allows the retina twice the amount of response time to register visual information in the mind.

Operating against the conventions of a "couch potato" lifestyle, Russel Hulsey has created a sculpture in which the viewer must literally work to watch, becoming an active component with the monitor. Scanning up and down and crossing the path of the vertical hold, the eye spreads the visual information, unfolding a subliminal image.

As we recognize the image – a video of an electrical socket – it becomes clear that all the elements of the sculpture have an interpretational function. For instance, the television set can be read as a muscular, masculine element, in contrast to the feminine cipher of the electrical socket. As a sublimated image, this cipher elicits our desire to see it more clearly, in the belief that clear sight equates clarity of meaning. The mirror not only reflects the material we are certain we see, it also projects the image that eludes our sight.

By simple technical means, Hulsey explores the arena of what we see and how we come to interpret it. While at first Mother seems to be a work that is focused upon an optical "trick," a closer examination suggests that it is actually drawing into question the literal way in which we tend to view the world. This view holds that meaning is something that accumulates around the work, in and through the complex way that the viewer interacts with it.

Julien Robson,
Curator of Contemporary Art
Speed Art Museum

Illuminated Text

“[Illuminated Text] flashes disconnected words at mind-numbing speed with little time for reflection.  The text must be taken at first association only.  The succession builds and smashes streams of thought based on each viewer’s individual perspective.”

Julie Ball Hambrick
Arts & Culture Writer,
Dialogue

Illuminated Text relays an impossibly quick thread of words whose meaning can only be grasped as a combination of words in relation to others, tied by the spectator(s) cognitive combinations of words and their subjective meaning.  The viewer is denied the ability to focus upon any one specific word representing an idea for any length of duration; thus, there is no time to form a fixed viewpoint.  This digital "flow of information" evokes a computer's programmed scrolling structure, and forms the beginning of an idea directed around the written word. In this specific case, the work takes on a self-illumination, and the radiant words reach from the digital structuralized vapor upon which contemporary communication is designed. By using a "push" force of telling and addressing, the "pull" of the viewer in effect designs the piece. This monitor-work suggests the cultural control of television and the media's overall ubiquitous presence. The title, Illuminated text, is intended as a way of linking this newer form of work with a more traditional embodiment of the written word. 

Gandhi Bleeding

An expressive, straight-forward portrait, of Mohandas K. Gandhi is turned into a “performance piece” when the artist dips his fist into a bucket of red paint and punches Gandhi square in the face, leaving red paint to drip like blood from a fresh wound.  “This was the final act in order to bring the work into completion,” according to Hulsey.  It took awhile to complete the piece – as the artist studied Gandhi’s life and his writings for a solid year.  After the drawing/painting was finished, the artist traveled to India and visited Gandhi’s samadhi (grave) on the anniversary of his untimely passing. 

"Sometimes the stomach of this world is not yet able to digest the fruit that grows in the garden – This is why Gandhi is bleeding.  It took a year to complete; it was very difficult to do, to hit Gandhi, said Hulsey. The red transforms the straightforward portrait into a statement for peace, yet this effort is achieved through the contradiction of violence. While some of [Hulsey’s] works are ambiguous, Gandhi Bleeding leaves little doubt about its meaning.”

Jo Anne Triplett
Visual Arts Editor,
LEO

XYZ centers on two images of African-American civil war soldiers.  Drawn as if abstracted from old newsprint, the two figures appear to be fading from the surface of the work, as if history has forgotten them.  Around these two figures are arranged images of faces, drawn in a number of differing ways, a complex of representations of women and children.  Other images populate the work in a fragmented field of disjointed signs that suggest an alienated contemporary life that cannot connect to history.  Hulsey talks of XYZ struggling to find some kind of closure, or redemption, a condition that is continually thwarted by its visual disjunction.  The two figures dominate the image as a reminder that without coming to terms with the past, the present can find no resolve. 

Julien Robson,
Speed Art Museum

Sounding (a picture worth a thousand words)

Sounding is an encoded abstraction of a woman’s face represented as an audio “sine” waveform.  Here, the artist has intended to represent the power of voice, of words, by literally creating a portrait of a person as represented by her own vocal chord patterns and imaged into her likeness.  This process symbolizes the distinct signature and personal affect that each of us have upon one another – and the world – when we speak.  In this sense, we are what we communicate.  We project our “portraits” inside our intentions through words, be they constructive or deconstructive.     

Vomiting Up the Phantom

“In an exhibit about conundrums and visual and aural dilemmas, it is fitting that Hulsey's most quickly grasped work (so you think) is the most complex to assimilate. "Vomiting up the phantom" is a loop video of a man shouting, whimpering, intoning "Hey" in a field of rolled hay bales. He confronts, but does he defeat or is he defeated by his personal demons in the wilderness?”

Diane Heilenman,
Art Critic
The Courier-Journal

Vomiting Up the Phantom is inspired by the writings of Thomas Merton (b.1915, d.1968), a Kentucky-based writer, poet, artist, social activist, and monk.  Merton wrote extensively on the human quest for discovery of the true self.  He admired the writings of Paul Evdokimov concerning the early Desert Fathers (spiritual ascetics) who, he wrote, “ … [went] into the desert to vomit up the interior phantom, the doubter, the double.”  In this video-loop work the desert is replaced by a quiet, pastoral landscape near the artist’s home in Kentucky; the scene, however, is meant to retain the same reflective quality and solitude of that of the formers’ desert.  In this manner, Vomiting Up the Phantom suggests a personal quest that is universal – to find one’s true meaning, or to somehow become more real.  This search stretches across borders, boundaries, and landscapes; it is essentially a fundamental aspect of the human spirit.  Phantom presents a commentary that is at once ridiculous and absurd – humble and sincere.

The First and the Last (Wash Cycle)

This continuous-loop video projection shows a man standing in front of a chalkboard (or blackboard) who unendingly drags his fingernails across the surface, back and forth – in and out, creating a difficult meditation, with sound that in high decibels would make anyone cringe.  What it is about proves difficult to discern.  There is a looming darkness, and a brutal quality to the work at first.  Though, once past the initial shock the piece delivers, one may find themselves becoming involved in a mysterious and heart-wrenching exercise; one that alludes to the pain and struggle of life’s essiential lessons out of which we learn and grow.  Blackboard appears to be about a personal struggle or a battle against the demons of self.  On this note, each time the man brings his hands completely inward he lowers his head – becoming headless – a symbolic reference perhaps to the shedding of self-ego.  

Girls On Trampolines (Muslim Edition) keenly borrows its title from The Man Show: Girls On Trampolines [see link below].  This life-sized video projection depicts a Muslim woman from Yemen bouncing up and down upon a trampoline.  It is not difficult to grasp that this work is meant to be humorous.  However, the humor at play is ingested with a deliberately sharp and sardonic wit that causes one to delve deeply into a multiplicity of difficult issues ranging from cultural relativism, feminist existentialism, the socio-sexual “male gaze” phenomenon, and so forth.  One may ponder any such issue with appropriate relevance to this work.  The “Muslim Edition” is pointed, yet, remains decidingly open-ended.  The artist states, “The trampoline itself functions here as a metaphor relating to an active quest for freedom.”  As she (the video’s subject) ascends, it is as if she is trying to break free from her bonds.  Yet, in this case, gravity itself becomes an essential and metaphorical element that, without fail, pulls her back down – again and again.  Is she trying to escape her own cultural bonds, or the presumptions we tend project upon her?  Perhaps both? Girls On Trampolines (Muslim Edition) provides no answer, only a necessary beginning, to a welcomed critical discussion.    

From Ozzie to Ozzy (Television Families)

The series From Ozzie to Ozzy documents almost six decades of television families (selecting two from each decade, 1950’s – present).  It is intended to promote discourse concerning cultural shifts and perceptive changes of what family is, and the dynamics of how it may operate in a given time and place with a set of particular circumstances.

“Through his comparisons of these make-believe families that we know so well, Russel Hulsey invites us to examine what popular culture tells us about family.  Why did so many people want to be just like the Brady family and see the Munsters as odd?  The blurry appearance of the images brings to mind time past and questions how our perspectives toward these families and family in general have changed.”

Karen Gillenwater,
Director of Art Galleries and Curator of Collections,
Georgetown College

“In [ From Ozzie to Ozzy ], a series of ink on canvas, Hulsey explores the transformation of families we know and love from our television screens, from the 1950s to today … ‘[This] series documents families starting with Ozzie and Harriet to the reality TV show of Ozzy Osbourne.  Since TV has been sitting in the family room across America, there has always been a TV family, always been a fictitious family that we, the viewing public, become involved with, that we learn from,’ [said Hulsey].”

Benita Heath,
Contributing Culture Writer
Lexington Herald-Leader

bryce hudson
valerie sullivan fuchs
thaniel ion lee
chad person
sabrina raaf
ik joong kang
miranda july
nalini malani
daniel lanois
jim campbell
david levinthal
william mcdonough
wendell berry
michael brohm
sarah lyon

Places

art ecology
lexington art league
the green building gallery
santa barbara contemporary art forum
ben maltz gallery
electronic visualization laboratory
postmasters
video data bank
creative capital
merton center
muhammad ali center
appalshop
BELEF
21c museum
museum plaza