ISLAND EFFECTS

Now thru Sept 22 @ Armory Center for the Arts

Island Effects takes, as a point of departure, mass-hysterical narratives grounded in an understanding of the world which has effectively stalled at the pre-teen level; an understanding which can be described in terms of an "island effect" or, a sort of perceptual inbreeding witnessed within insular environments.

The crème-de-la-crème of these psychic narratives is that of California (finally) falling into the ocean;  and it is from within this logic that Skuldt is able to revisit certain "grade-school scientific misunderstandings channeled through middle-school art-therapeutic practices while confined to an adult brain" to develop a body of work meeting at the confluence of "scientifically-informational" and "informally science-fictional."

But within these considerations, any plausible cause-and-effect relationship is doubtful (in light of such a preposterous overabundance of water, certainly exceeding any sea-level shifts conceivably caused by submerging-land-mass or global-warming scenarios), begging us to look past the apocalyptic in favor of a study of volumes and spatial translations – “from the physical, to the informational, and back to the physical – posed as a collection of played-out articulations of special causes, special effects, and views from space.”