MAURICIO ANCALMO: DUBITATIO
October 17th - November 14th, 2009
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 4-7pm

Baer Ridgway Exhibitions is pleased to present in the lower gallery a new project by San Francisco based artist, Mauricio Ancalmo. Dub Chain: part 1-4 (2009) is a four-part piece consisting of 16mm projectors stacked one on top of the other with looped film and sound. The soundtrack, as well as the image, is echoed by each projector in a chain, producing a Markov's Chain, characterized by simultaneous projection of the past, present and the future. Duration is ongoing.

"The principle notion of the work is that given any chain, the future is a random process where all information about the future is contained in the present state, i.e. one does not need to examine the past to determine the future. In other words, the description of the present state fully captures all the information that could influence the future evolution of the process. Being a stochastic process means that all state transitions are probabilistic determined by random chance and thus unpredictable in detail, though likely predictable in its statistical properties. It is from this process that the re-territorialization of the space happens and the language of dub is formed." - Mauricio Ancalmo

Over the duration of this exhibition, the film loop projected will change weekly and with it, the mood and connotations of the piece.

Part One: Fourth Articulation / Sonic Chain
African drums, Horowitz on piano, and radio telescope sounds create a rhythmic soundscape.

Part Two: First Articulation / Tower of Babel
A conversation that leads to more conversation, always changing, never ending.

Part Three: Second Articulation / What would I fight for?
Based on a poem by D.H. Lawrence, the artist uses his own blood in an attempt to answer that question for himself.

Part Four: Fifth Articulation / Markov's Reversible Fountain
A cascading river that flows in the opposite direction is one possibility in a Markov reversible chain.

San Francisco based artist, Mauricio Ancalmo has most recently worked with discarded objects such as sewing machines, word processors, 16mm film projectors and turntables as the principal characters in his theatre-sized installations. In these installations, such autonomous objects are introduced to 16mm film loops and intricately set up to interact with each other resulting in the production of camera-less films. The process procures from the idea of art that makes art, treating film as an ephemeral material, mixing it with performative elements, and residing in the realm of kinetic sculpture.

Raised in El Salvador and the United States, Mauricio Ancalmo works from a dual cultural perspective, drawing on cultural and personal themes such as circumstance, assimilation, and isolation. His work through sound and image is reminiscent of personal artifacts based on experience, striving to grasp individuality within the collective conscience.