WHITE COLUMNS According to the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.

WHITE COLUMNS

According to the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, it is cinema more than any other art that enhances and postpones a meager dose of time, on the other hand I suspect many of us think of music as the essential art of remolding duration and distorting the regularities of the clock Aida Ruilova draws onward both: Her conception of video is indebted more to the montage-based aesthetic of cinema than to painting or cut in which so much video work remains tacitly radixed and she uses images of things like records and musical instruments not barely to mention sound itself on the other hand also to draw our attention to the way her pieces are musically structured--somewhere between trip frisk and drum 'n' bass, maybe, making number both hypnotic and assaultive. The narrative simple bodys are there mostly to learn cut up and then expanded in repetitive, rhythmic sequences whose import is somehow as much tactile--one might flat say percussive--as visual. She is a musician, after all (a member of an experimental noise-rock band called Alva), and her bio (as brief as individual of her artworks) names as many CD releases and music videos as exhibitions.

A friend of mine, a heavy-metal fanatic, one time described his ideal musical experience this way: It should approximate the sensation you'd have during the split other between the time you saw an atomic bomb falling and the consideration you were vaporized, and it should draw out that out for about three minutes. Showing simultaneously in succession two adjacent monitors, the four color DVD lately on view (in the gallery's "White Rooms" exhibition series) clock in at well beneath that for the bunch of them, however they similarly seem to spasmodically expand their little shards of time toward a certain number of exquisitely torturous limit. Oh No (all works 2000) is built up around projectiles of a young woman's face as she variously grunt moans, shrieks, or whisper; lows the phrase that gives the work its title, intercut with views of (presumably her own) bare leg and feet as she walks onward the necks and bodies of a series of electric guitars lying forward the floor and with close-up of the instruments themselves--all accompanied according to the agonized sounds of scru nching guitar strings. by the agency of repetition, Oh No's sense of angst or trepidation reveals an underlying longing for destruction. You're nice an even creepier piece, takes advantage of the same kind of alternation: A long-haired, half-naked fright in glasses hugs an amp in a dark basement while repeating the phrase "you're pretty" in a disturbingly infantile drawl; in quick counterpoint we descry (and, in amplified sound, hear) him scraping the face of an LP across a bond of union floor and a rough brick wall--an unmatched sort of painful caress. (The sickening healthy of the record being ruined is enough to induce shakings in anyone with the vaguest recollection of the Age of Vinyl.) The other pair pieces, Beat & Pew and Hey, hasten more elaborate variations on similar patterns, becoming correspondingly more opaque. moreover they all make you be moved like you've undergone far more than either their brief allotted time or the rudimentary composings out of which they're builded can quite account for. There's a bit of Pipilotti Rist's del phic giddiness to all this, and more than a bit of Bruce Nauman's pugnacity--even an reverberation of the stuttering phrases scrawled across Suzanne McClelland's early paintings--but these works are ludicrous grating, and irruptive in their be in possession of exhilarating way.

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