The bare LED light bulbs hanging from black cords are surprisingly architectural, like a stranded wall waiting for light. The microphone on a stand in front of them is a performance waiting to happen. The performance comes from the visitor taking up the invitation of the piece’s title, shout.
The installation by Maksym Prykhodko, on view at Var Gallery in the “Art + Tech” exhibition, is indeed waiting for you. If you’re feeling shy, tapping on the microphone will wake things up as lights turn on randomly, but the greater the volume, the greater the energy and light. So go ahead, give it a shout.
Several pieces have an audio presence in this show, including noisemakers by Pete Prodoehl. The contraptions are on pedestals or hung on the walls with buttons to press and knobs to twirl. They emanate analog sounds with delightfully old-school space age tones. What makes it tick?
We won’t get into those nuts and bolts, but the moments of our actions having an effect on something is a useful premise to keep in mind. The interactive nature is an effort to make us active participants in the art, and maybe pique our imagination into the unseen ways things work.
Interactivity is only a segment of “Art + Tech,” however. It is a pleasure to see pieces by Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern as they have a longstanding collaboration producing videos with an overlay of drawings. Some have a quintessentially Milwaukee flair, like Meditation, a view of a bowling alley. The drawn elements remind us of more discreet time markers, like pulling out a stop-motion frame that gets lost in the shuffle.
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Artists like Bryan Cera use 3D printing to create ceramics and suggest new ways of working in portraiture, while Alycia M. Griesi’s photographic prints, Malfunctions, in which figures are overlaid and disjoined like a nascent digital Cubism, refocus ideas about fluidity and invention of form. “Art + Tech” is about the work of 12 artists who fixate on methods and processes of creating art where the medium is integral to the message.
Through Feb. 3 at Var Gallery, 643 S. Second St.
