06/16/2005 11:18 PM NYArtsMagazine

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Stephan Apicella- Hitchcock:
Palimpsests at Gigantic Artspace

Jessica Kraft

A filmmaker by temperament and an artist by profession, Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock sees the timespace continuum divided into proportional frames. Working in sculpture, video and photography, his work balances formal explorations in film with generational themes: the icons and sensibilities of skater culture, the residue of the Beat Generation and East coast/West coast rivalry in the 1980s. A singular objet appears in the entry window of the Gigantic Artspace gallery. An inclined ramp abuts a shelf with several small shelves that are topped with a white PVC pipe. Part CD storage rack, part skateboard practice toy, the large wooden sculpture is also part Donald Judd, part Ikea. But the dimensions of this work fit more than just a studio apartment. Called 2.35:1,(2005), its title refers to the proportional ratio of width to height on a widescreen film projection. And the width and height of the sculpture is indeed this proportion, but the length is also determined by Apicella-Hitchcock’s height: 5’ 9". These symbolic touches make the piece less abstract and lend a narrative quality to what might be seen at first as furniture. If epic movies are shot on film with this ratio, and an epic always needs a hero, then the artist is positioning himself as the protagonist–something he does throughout the show. Many of the works are photographs synchronized in various postcard dimensions. The Plot is Very Bare, (2005) is a series of photos that are arranged at intervals of one step, with each photo taken one pace closer to the final shot. The effect is one of slow and deliberate penetration of the final object–a formal simile of the actual place being depicted: a dug-out bench in Encino, California, where the character Stacy from the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) loses her virginity. This combination of fundamental human experience with bubbly pop culture repeatedly surfaces in the exhibition. Some of Apicella-Hitchcock’s photos are documentation of journeys that the artist took–some successfully (like when he went by skateboard from Newark, New Jersey to LA to deliver a record), and some not so successfully (like when he tried to get to the island of Lisca Blanca in a recreation of an Antonioni’s L'Avventura, but landed on another island). These postcard travel diaries seem to be the weakest pieces because they rely not on imagery or formal concerns, but on rather trivial and quirky travel gimmicks. Desire Lines (2005) is a composite of rapidly scrolling film credits that are impossible to focus on. Beside providing a popular access point into his work (everyone has been frustrated by the speed of credits before), this work underscores the unifying nature of film structure. All films have similar end credits, for instance, and so this work effectively stands in for the end of every movie. In the wall panel, one set of credit lines were frozen into geometric patterns during a blurred march across the screen. The panel is hung like a child’s growth chart on a narrow wall, and tops out at the protagonist’s height of 5’ 9". Record, 2005, is the simplest and probably the best in the show. It’s a large color photograph of an object that might be an elongated cigarette, a scrap of wallpaper or a straw wrapper. It is actually the spine of his favourite record shot without perspective and enlarged so that its function is almost unrecognizable. "Palimpsests" holds together conceptually, and the individual works speak to similar formal and pop culture issues. But the reference to a literary concept in the title seems rather incongruous. A palimpsest is a parchment that has been written on, erased, and written over several times so that many layers of text are discernable on the surface. But the artist’s works are so right-angled and clean (down to the picture-perfect details of a last-minute installation), that the idea of a tangle of scrawled text just doesn’t apply. Could this most trendy of postmodern-theory words be the conceit of the exhibition–a far-fetched metaphor meant to convey simply the fact that the artist is capable of dealing with higher orders of thought? A more literal title (Postcards From The Edge?) would have made the show more coherent.