Filmmakers create art with light and sound

Art is certainly not confined to paint and canvas for the Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ newest… Art is certainly not confined to paint and canvas for the Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ newest installation artist. ‘Meaning for me comes out of creating potential for experiencing,’ said Rick Gribenas, the local artist with a new installation in the Pittsburgh Filmmakers Gallery. His art creates this potential with a technological landscape of video projections and LED screens in which the audience becomes a participant and completes the work by experiencing it. ‘The sound and the person in that space are the things that resolve it,’ said Gribenas. ‘Your presence or someone else’s presence within these projections and sculptures becomes integral to how the work operates and your navigation of that piece.’ The installation is made up of two video projections on adjacent walls. There are also 55 LED screens approximately one cubic inch in size that shine subtle red lights through the viewing space and into the corner where the videos project. One projection shows a drummer playing in a continuous seven-and-a-half-minute loop, and the other projection shows the lobby of a photographic portrait studio, which runs on a continuous 21-minute loop. The LED displays operate on a continuous loop. Each display is programmed with a microprocessor that is attached to the back and the display then runs on a program. ‘[The LED display] goes through this cycle of oscillation, and it’s about the oscillation and how the red lights fade and change next to the loop of the drummer next to the lobby shot,’ said Gribenas. ‘All of these things independently are autonomous objects, but in the end they all overlap in that process and end up starting to project meaning.’ When Gribenas uses the word ‘objects,’ he refers not to things that can be physically held, but sound and projected light. ‘Thinking about sound and light as objects,’ said Gribenas, ‘you can begin to shape our spaces.’ The title of the installation, ‘It’s Not Quite the Way,’ is the element that joins the pieces of the installation together and allows them to operate in conjunction.’ The way the light and sound work together forms a space that allows the audience, through observation over time, to recognize the patterns that emerge out of the work’s repetition, said Gribenas.’ It is a space formed by sound and light, which Gribenas considers the unheard objects in the installation. ‘The piece comes out of the unheard and the idea of the unheard,’ said Gribenas, ‘which are two different things in that we can describe what’s unheard, but we imagine the idea of the unheard.’ Gribenas pointed out that the spaces that surround us in our daily lives contain these unheard objects, even as we walk down the street. ‘The high pressure sodium lights, the street lights that we all sit under, are constantly asserting their presence,’ said Gribenas. ‘These lights suspend the city. They suspend a space.’ The goal for the installation is to create a suspended space similar to those that surround us in our daily lives, said Gribenas. ‘That’s a lofty goal,’ said Gribenas. ‘But the work is attempting to study the space, to look at that space and its shape and provide the oscillations to lift it up so that it steps away from the space that it is.’ By introducing something new to the space and influencing the way that space happens, even if it lasts only for a brief moment, this suspension of space allows the space to re-imagine itself. ‘There’s something really exciting to me about the idea that someone can own a car that can erase your entire house,’ said Gribenas. ‘You sit in your house and everything can disappear for a brief moment as it passes by. There’s something about that sound and its potential to wash away what exists that I find very exciting.’ Our everyday experiences hold numerous possibilities for the redefinition of how a space happens, and these experiences are embedded in our culture.’ Gribenas said that borrowing these elements of possibility from our culture can assign meaning to a work. Exploring sound has always been one of Gribenas’ primary interests, even as a kid. He said that he found it interesting to take apart objects that played sound, such as tape decks, and reassemble them, changing their function and operation. ‘I pull from a lot of different sources,’ said Gribenas. ‘Some are analog and some of them are digital. Technical problems are part of the story, and the ones that survive are formative to how that work operates.’ For Gribenas, the way artwork operates forms a system. For example, the way the projections, the LED screens and the sculpture work together in this installation forms a system.’ ‘A lot of my work looks at systems and how pushing them can force an oscillation which can be destructive,’ said Gribenas. ‘One note can destroy another, depending on the way things oscillate.’ Gribenas is interested in experimenting with the limits of these systems and their capabilities. ‘Pushing these systems to fail, or close to a point at which they can fail, or a point at which that oscillation can then create any moment is my goal,’ said Gribenas. ‘That’s the overarching goal for all my work.’