In the space of a breath

What if you could witness the passage of time through a hole in the wall?

(A journey through an art exhibition)

By Laura Neal

New Mexico is the land of enchantment and home to the International UFO Museum located in Roswell, a city defined by the speculation of its beauty and its mystery. On view at the Roswell Museum and Art Center (RMAC), artist Erica Bailey invites you to reconsider two of our most enigmatic mysteries: time and space.

Bailey’s exhibition, in the space of a breath, combines dioramas and video. Questions of perception are at the crux of this exhibition. The room itself is entirely dark, the only light coming from the projected videos. Two large black walls the artist has constructed within the gallery create a cavernous pathway through the room. On the ceiling a speaker reverberates the bioacoustics of crickets and cicadas effectively sedating the space. There are three different entry points into the exhibition: from a hallway, walking up a ramp, and from an adjoining room. I found that I confronted the exhibition differently depending on where I chose to enter; one way with caution, one way in earnest, and one way with intrigue.

From the hallway, you approach black curtains that hang ceiling to floor; I’m reminded of the theater or an auditorium and expect rows of connecting cushioned seats on the other side. Once close enough you notice an opening at the end of the curtain. Entering this way made me question what it means to approach darkness with caution—even in an inhabited public place; a question not about fear of darkness, but that of interruption and/or disruption. Already, I’m staged with the conundrum that a conditional environment causes me to recognize vulnerability.

Entering up the ramp, I see the ambient light from the projector slipping down one of the black walls. The absence of curtains and the slight ramp incline offers an ‘eager-effect’ if you will. It creates a desire to see what is being cast in that darkness.

Entering from the brightly adjoining room, you step into a makeshift hall created by the large black walls and are in full view of the video projection. Faint purple light emanates from a hole in one of the walls. Inside this hole is what I can only describe as an amphitheater stocked with survival / experimental plants of an unexplored territory—possibly inside a space vessel, but I encourage you to see for yourself. On the opposite wall there is a second hole inside which is a cave dwelling with mountains, fire, and a moving sky. The first word that comes to me is Jurassic. These two architectural dioramas feel like portals projecting between distant past and future. For a moment I feel like a time traveler.

There’s a reason these two dioramas are in proximity of each other. Bailey’s works “exhibits a fascination with binary oppositions—particularly spatial ones such as inside/outside, close/remote—and often references events that unfold over unfathomable expanses of time and distance or realities beyond our natural means of perception” (Erica Bailey, artist). Just the act of looking into something small onto something large alters the relationship with space. How much of what we see everyday goes unnoticed? How far away are we really from variable and invariable universal shifts?

The video projections approach a potential response. One video in particular is consists of a split screen time lapse of a partly cloudy sky and a baby bird feasted upon by red ants with the bird’s broken shell in close proximity. There comes a point in the video, where the images are overlaid and the bird appears to be feasted upon in the sky. The installation essentially expands and refocuses the mundane through existential inquiry. What fascinates me is the method by which these inquiries are prompted. Not by bold colors or abstraction, but by neutrality. Black and white, death into ascension, bodies of dead insects on their backs the same as when we die. It’s daunting the expediency of everything, even when we feel at rest at nightfall, even when we feel distant or superior to animal or insect. With all discovery and all the unknown expanses, we share the ultimate expiration.

Art has the rare and valuable ability of alerting us to our cooperative humanity. What Bailey has achieved is a symmetry of experience in an asymmetrical dimension. Time and space are in constant motion. When was the last time you considered your own embodiment?

(Erica Bailey’s exhibition, in the space of a breath, is on display at the Roswell Museum and Art Center from September 21, 2019 – November 10, 2019)