Global Chaos, Healing Art:
The Works of Sam
Sebren
by Jay Blotcher
...“I am not saying anything is really
rosier, because I’m watching the destruction of this
place: Wal-Mart and pollution and outdoor advertising.”
Whether East Village poverty or Mid-Hudson Valley poverty,
the depiction of man at odds with his environment remains
a major theme in Sebren’s work.
This theme was explored with a renewed intensity
this past summer when Sebren was one of several artists asked
by the Kingston Sculpture Biennial to contribute an installation
for an unlikely gallery space: the recently vacated Ulster
County Jail in Kingston. Sebren was given a space that already
possessed an aura of dread: the Respiration Isolation Room
was created originally for quarantining inmates with tuberculosis.
His kinetic mind swimming with the possibilities,
Sebren created a sound, light and visual display he called
“CHAOS THEORY,” that simultaneously challenged
the trappings of the correctional system and created empathy
for prisoners. Among the pieces in his installation: an audiotape
statement by a friend of Sebren who had been at Riker’s
Island (a notorious New York City jail), paintings, drawings,
news clips and videos. Sebren festooned the walls with toy
guns, handcuffs, cop cars and police figures to dramatize
how “we have mass-merchandised issues of law and order.”
The artist’s ultimate goal? To create “a
maddening atmosphere” of disparate items that would
eventually come together for the visitor “in a giant
puzzle,” he said.
During the show, Sebren experienced one of
those rare moments that energizes an artist... CONTINUE....
|
