From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Rob Marks‘ review of Erased Loop Random Walk, a solo exhibition of works by Terry Berlier now on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. As Marks sees it, “Any despair over impending catastrophic environmental change evoked by [the work]…is balanced by a full-out sense of wonder and possibility.” This article was originally published on January 14, 2014.
Terry Berlier. Core Sampling (Tick Tock), 2009 (detail); FGR-95, dyes, steel, motors, MAKE Controller, computer, sensor, microscope camera, PVC, aluminum, pocket watch, and MAX. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: David Pace.
Half of the works in Terry Berlier’s Erased Loop Random Walk at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art hum with a mixture of ingenuity, obsolescence, and camp that would be at home in Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson’s Borgesian paean to the 17th century cabinets of wonder. The other half transport the visitor to what might seem to be a satellite installation of San Francisco’s Exploratorium, combining high technology with a do-it-yourself aesthetic to explore and reconfigure the world.
Berlier frames her show in terms of the passage of time. Some artworks mark the ticking seconds via the back-and-forth motion of a rocking chair, the subject of both I Would Not Change It and I’m Dying; This is a New Experience (both 2013). They also mark the length of a visit to the show, via the repetitions of the Beatles’s Here Comes the Sun emanating from When Comes the Sun (2012), a machine powered by a solar panel mounted on the museum’s roof. Several pieces reference the longer intervals encoded in tree rings and even the unfolding geological eras in the nine six-foot long ersatz “core samples” that compose Core Sampling (Tick Tock) (2009).