Stuart Bender
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Seven Prophecies
Induction
Visitations
Induction
Induction uses seven channels of video and three channels of music and sound to focus on the blurred boundaries between memory, history, fantasy, and dreams, with the attendant implications of the erosion of personal identity.
Video images combine live-action shots and pans with computer-drawn animated portraits; they are projected onto a flat wall, into a pit on the floor, and on a sculptural grouping of monitors.
The sung but wordless music track is structured on the Medieval technique of organum, where a fundamental melody is distorted and buried in order to accommodate florid overlays of other voices.
A single narrative is broken into nine sections read from three separate perspectives, which tell the fragmented story of a man whose identity is simultaneously observed and denied.
These elements work together to suggest erasure, uncertainty, and the creation of a personal void.
Press
Santa Monica Museum of Art February 23 - 29, 1996
LA Weekly
Art Picks of The Week
by Peter Frank
The installation work of Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli has long relied on metaphors even more elaborate than McCarren's, and certainly more hermetic. Bender and Funicelli do share with McCarren an appreciation for lucid, if not necessarily static, imagery and handsome calculated arrangement of elements in the space.
You may have missed their latest room work, Induction, when you went to check out what all the hubbub over Kim Dingle's Norton Collection selection was about; Induction is in the back, not making quite enough noise to alert you to its presence. But the piece well exemplifies Bender and Funicelli's concerns and modus operandi. Beginning with a look at what they call "The popular tendency to assign roles to men (the Provider, the Savior, the Victim. The Bad Boy)," the duo encompass religious constructs and rituals, personal psychohistory (and our culture's obsession with it), neo-primitivism, tattooing, and a whole host of referents and digressions.
All this is presented as hypnotizing multi-image surroundings reminiscent of (if darker-spirited and more narrative than) a '60's media bath, including single-monitor and multimonitor video components and projections on wall and floor.