Real Time Shifts: Peer Bode, Joseph Scheer, Jessie Shefrin - Artists' Statement

As a collaboration, Real Time Shifts results from an ongoing, complex, and subtle artistic interaction among its participants: Peer Bode, Joseph Scheer, and Jessie Shefrin. For almost a decade they have been working very closely toward shaping a new philosophy of art making and art education that stresses the integration of traditional processes with the fluidity afforded by new electronic tools. Real Time Shifts celebrates their achievement in the form of an evolving visual dialogue.

The collaboration between Bode, Scheer and Shefrin has yielded three concrete components in the form of a multi-media CD-ROM and a multi-channel video from which are derived a series of large-format digital prints. The CD-ROM was produced in collaboration with yet another artist, Darrin Martin. Before discussing the concerns of the trio, I must mention that Martin's CD-ROM design deserves special attention, as its navigational schemes and interactive animations offer their own insights into the generative processes of the art they display.
Bode, who is among the younger pioneers of signal-based video, has focused his artistic research on the structuring of time through analog and digital framing schemes and the interactive restructuring of memory. The abstract geometric forms and tonal gradations that appear in his work, which at times recall Constructivist imagery, are generated through the modulation of wave frequencies and voltage oscillations made possible with electronic tools designed and constructed by David Jones, Ralph Hocking and Bode himself. Bode's imagery, therefore, privileges the phenomenology of experience over illusionistic reference to it. Real-time processing folds the material processes of generative signal manipulation, of notation as recording, and of the experience of viewing into the same durational event. Viewing, then, produces an interface mirroring processes across the screen where an observational performance is simultaneously documented. That is perhaps why Bode speaks of the significance of embodiment in relation to the making and experiencing of his art.

If our experience of time is mirrored in the manipulations that structure the unfolding of material events, then Bode's increasingly complex transformations of past notations through recombination and layering across mediums and modes of operation can be viewed as attempts to structure and reconstruct memory. In fact, the image of a camel appears in Bode's work as a symbol of memory, as if it were on a journey carrying recombinant segments of experience across time frames. Bode's art becomes a process of questioning directed towards the ephemeral new media to which our culture entrusts its memory. Notations referring to electronic tool-designs penned decades ago on the yellowing pages of notebooks re-emerge, transformed into apparitions within a patterning of frames collaged with high-speed sequencing.
Jessie Shefrin has carried over the subtle spatial constructions and complex layering sensibilities she developed in her drawings and prints to her explorations in time-based media such as video processing and interactive CD-ROMs. Shefrin's art calls for a radical slowing of our rhythms of perceptual intake in order to open up our awareness of a vast network of unsuspected synergy sustaining a collective unconscious. She achieves her explorations with electronic tools usually associated with the accelerating pulse of contemporary activities. She paradoxically explains her meditative decelerations as ways of speeding up our capacity for achieving greater potentials by deepening our perceptions. Shefrin is fond of recording the doubling of lengthy sequences of events superimposed on transparent surfaces where they appear at once reflected and seen through. A seemingly masterful choreography of everyday life emerges where every element in the environment contributes to an anonymous orchestration she offers us to witness. In a sense, Shefrin searches for ways of demonstrating another paradox: the centrality of the peripheral. In Shefrin's universe no accidents occur; rather, connections are revealed through the alchemy of transformative processes. The electronic studio that fits in an overhead suitcase is her divining rod for seeking out nodes of synergy across the world.
Unlike the diffuse scope of Shefrin's gaze, Joseph Scheer directs his scrutiny toward the astounding beauty of the minutiae we dismiss as a nuisance with a swat. He uses very high resolution scanning technology to create an effect of hyperreal vision that reveals structures of astounding complexity in commonplace insects such as flies and moths. In another sense, there are striking similarities in terms of perceptual slowing down between Scheer's interest in the ordinary and Shefrin's focus on the peripheral. Scheer denies the existence of the common in relation to life. His art celebrates as much as it demonstrates the infinite range of diversity that renders every form unique. Our definitions and classifications are doomed to remain inadequate but may also grow into restrictions that prevent explorations of uniqueness. His interest in moths, for instance, is not only based on their wondrous beauty but also on their ability to humble scientists with their baffling variety. With over 100,000 species already identified vast numbers still await discovery. I suspect Scheer finds in the ever-increasing potential for diversification of life forms a permission for the release of his imagination. The multi-channel video installation where their works are simultaneously displayed in endlessly varied sequences should allow for additional insights into the synergy that activates this remarkable trio.

Gerar Edizel
Rochester, New York
August, 2000