Cinematic Corridor Shows Series of Short Films

Behind the glass doors of the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery lies a boxy room outfitted with the hardwood floors and high white walls traditionally associated with art galleries. However, the space in which “Mark Lewis: Three Cinematic Works”—on view until October 16—is displayed is far from traditional.

In a quaint corridor only just noticeable behind the security desk, three mid-sized plasma screen televisions and three plush leather couches line opposite walls while Lewis’ works—“Downtown: Tilt, Zoom and Pan,” “Rush Hour, Morning and Evening, Cheapside,” and “Queensway: Pan and Zoom”—play on a continuous loop, one on each of the three screens. Lewis’ videos mark the first official exhibit of the Sert Gallery’s new visual media space that makes art accessible by catering to a modern audience’s limited attention span.

To Dominique Bluher, the exhibit’s curator and lecturer on Visual and Environmental Studies, much thought goes into the types of images that are shown in galleries in order to avoid reducing the space to a mainstream movie theater. “I think [Lewis’] work is ... very interesting because he has given a lot of thought about how long these movies are, and he has created works that are valuable in cinema but work exactly in a space where people are coming, standing, discussing, [and] wondering,” she says. While Lewis’ works fit ideally into this new viewing space, the true impetus for the exhibit was actually “Freshman Seminar 38K: ‘Cinema in Theory and Practice’” that Bluher began teaching this fall. “When I was thinking about teaching this class ... I wanted to focus on short films,” she says. “One of [the theories that Lewis] puts in quite a provocative way is that long films can’t be shown in this kind of [art gallery] context because the people wouldn’t spend the time to sit through a movie that is longer than five minutes.” The newly created film media space reflects Lewis’ films in an uncanny way: both are short, visually engaging, and nontraditional.

For David N. Rodowick, the chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Interim Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, securing the space and then transforming it into the media exhibit was a straightforward process. “I had been looking for a long time for other ways to use the building to expose art [beyond] just ... our traditional spaces in the main lobby and in the Sert gallery,” he says. “I was walking here to meet some people in the offices back there, and I went ‘What can I do with this space?’ ... We came in with $3,000 of unspent money and we put in [the] monitors. It’s as easy as that.”

Like Bluher, Rodowick also commented on how the newly created space was perfect for Lewis’ work. “He’s a rather astounding artist, I think. What’s interesting about his work is that he’s very attentive to scale,” he says. “[Lewis] understood that you could make very compelling works of short length that were very challenging in terms of their questions of composition of movement or stillness, silence, or sound, which makes them, I think, perfect for this kind of show.”

The appeal of Lewis’ work is not limited to art professionals just as its message is not confined to the gallery space. Stephanie H. Liu ’15, a student in Bluher’s freshman seminar, was struck by the power of Lewis’ art in her own life. “His work is really interesting because it makes me stop and think about scenes ... Now, as I’m walking along in my daily life I start seeing ordinary scenes and I say ‘What potential is here? Look for the beauty.’” In displaying Lewis’ work, the Carpenter Center’s new media viewing area helps spread this message of encouraging people go beyond looking for art in art galleries to finding it in their everyday lives.