Thursday, March 29, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Temporary Distortion artfully deconstructs the NYPD. By Helen Shaw
The creative duo behind Temporary Distortion—theater-artist Kenneth Collins and filmmaker William Cusick—just keep elevating their game. You could call that game sculptural video, or perhaps living set design, or maybe just multimedia ravishment. Whatever it is, their police-portrait Newyorkland passes their other, already high bar (from sleek genre explorations like Americana Kamikaze) with a welter of textures, the interaction of which proves as seductive and sad and funny as narrative can elsewhere.
As always, Collins designs the piece as a contained world-within-a-world, this time as a sort of exploded Cornell box framed in neon and draped in yellow caution tape. The structure’s facade is a massive screen displaying Cusick’s bleached-out re-creation of ’70s-era cop movies, while at floor-level a quartet of lawmen speak from square openings—impassive as dolls in their plastic packaging. The 60-minute work operates as a series of beginnings and then one very long ending: the film switches from pretend-documentary to the jazzy titles of imaginary TV show (like “The Rookie: He Can’t Catch a Break”) to dreamy, blued-out images of New York. It begins again and again (which genre willNewyorkland settle on?) and then it fades away, mournfully, into the dark. Not every moment rings perfectly true, and much depends on your ability to jam to John Sully’s varied, frequently spectacular score. The surprising match between subject and aesthetic, though, carries the day. Who would have thought that the boys in blue—themselves so accustomed to herding the rest of us—would look so beautiful pinned behind an artistic cordon
http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/theater/2486261/review-newyorkland
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