Upon entering the dimly lit gallery, one encounters a tasteful pile of smooth rocks under a spotlight. How poetic, in a bad way. But looking up, we see the fire retardant black foil, focusing the flood light into a spot. That is a good relationship, having a very tasteful, Crate and Barrel-like arrangement of attractive stones offset by crude but useful black foil. Many moments in this installation by Selina Trepp allow the utility of makeshift solutions to deflate an otherwise polished and intriguing set up.

Also in the main gallery, a projector mounted to the wall shines into a broken mirror which splits an image onto two walls, making two videos out of one. This sort of improvisation is, for the most part, an effective strategy.  In the middle of the gallery more shards of mirror form a curtain supported by threads of monofilament that are stapled to the floor; the effect is sloppy, just missing that needed bit of roughness that would have been nice. Still, the plane of broken mirror fragments produces a unique effect - it hurls bits of bright light into your face while it recedes into the darkness. Likewise it casts flecks of light around the gallery and onto the wall where the video is projected.  These light shards, so to speak, create a unifying, and at the same time disruptive experience, that deepens this work.

Selina Trepp. Installation view of "Appear to Disappear" at Andrew Rafacz Gallery. Image courtesy of the artist and Andrew Rafacz Gallery.

Between the projector and jagged curtain, and the corner where the video is projected, sits a bucket. The sounds of invisible rocks clanging against the bucket seem to echo within it. The implication of a ghostly phenomenon still captivates the viewer even while presented with the artificial source: the speaker is clearly visible.

The video effectively behaves as two, divided as it is by the mirror and projecting onto adjacent walls. On the left: a young woman picks up rocks from an unseen source and tosses them. They disappear, and then, “Clunk!” goes the bucket in the gallery. This is where I realize how literal the objects in the gallery space are, which was a bit disappointing. The piled rocks are the rocks from the movie. And the bucket is the bucket where the rocks land.

In the video on the right, a man is putting on a Hazmat suit. The background is stark white, so the white suit makes him disappear. He zips up, covers his face and is gone. The girl gets up and walks off. She enters the video on the right wall where he was. He walks in on the left, without the Hazmat suit, and sits down. The man begins picking up the rocks from the same unseen source and tosses them, again clanging the bucket in our world. He looks tired as he sits and carefully examines some of the stones. Holding them, contemplating them, he seems to be considering problems from elsewhere in his life, burdens that add up and wear on you. “Anyway, I guess I’ll toss this rock,” his body language seems to say.  He picks up another one, getting lost again for a moment.

Meanwhile the young woman is doing a disappearing act by spray-painting herself out. A sheet of glass must be between her and the camera. Spraying it white, it blends seamlessly the background.  There is a nice play between the seriousness with which the characters go about their actions, and the disarming way things are logistically carried out. A nice touch in the young woman’s performance is how thoroughly she obliterates, and defines, the sheet of glass. She goes to great effort to paint out the entire rectangle even after her body is adequately blocked by white paint.

Eventually, something breaks off-frame. The characters switch spaces again. The woman goes back to tossing the rocks and the man, with great drawn out tension, deliberately and carefully steps to where the young woman was, kicking bits of freshly painted white glass we can’t see. It all repeats.

In the second gallery, the artist presents hand-painted signs for works of art. They are on panel and have beveled edges imitating the way a museum does wall labels. These signs are oversized, though. At first it seems like these are the labels for all the elements in the main gallery, since the whole exhibition is collectively titled “Appear to Disappear.” These labels seem to refer to works that are nowhere to be found. The tangible labels take the potential focus and interest of picturing an imaginary object and puts it on the objects themselves. The idea of absent artworks becomes almost an afterthought.

It is a strange combination presented by one artist: the literal video installation and the room of labels for art that isn’t there. That incongruity is interesting, though. As one label reads, “Things Happen. Or Not.”  Perhaps some things almost happen, and that's just as it should be.

--Erik Wenzel