"I always have a song stuck in my head," says artist Rebecca Dolan, who adds with a smile, "and I don't mind sharing it with others." There is indeed an infectious quality to Dolan's work, largely video installations that adeptly combine the visual and the aural in ways that stay with you long after you've left the gallery. In her works, voices resonate with haunting dissonance while viewers negotiate their way through frenetic, murky interiors. A child's blurred visage emerges from, then returns, to blackness, while a woman's voice provides sonorous, if fleeting, solace, in its a cappella rendition of a familiar spiritual. Blaring bagpipes disrupt the serene pastoral idyll of a Kansas cornfield. Or, in perfect synchronization, a deadened voice calls out to no one in particular and stirs unseen life to dance upon a lake's surface. As the voice breaks into song, the reflective pool fractures into undulating ripples, carrying the viewer from stasis to transition, an imagined place that is both less certain and more hopeful.
Such overlays characterize Dolan's work: where her imagery teeters towards despair, sound soothes us; when cacophony threatens to drive us crazy, images offer an oasis. We are never meant to get comfortable one way or the other, shifting our allegiance between what we see and what we hear, such that neither seems a real safe bet. Dolan is thus able to address with coherence such antithetical dichotomies as hope/disillusionment; trust/betrayal; meditation/mayhem; authority/impotence; loss/ knowledge. Her terrain is ultimately a landscape of memory, real and imagined, scarred with secrets, buoyed by revelations and stolen moments, ever dependent on our willingness to perpetually shift the balance of our perceptions.
Dolan grew up in Denver, Colorado, and came to the medium of video through still photography, in which she majored as an undergraduate at Colorado State University. This early training is evident in her video work: her abrupt transitions between scenes; her use of the frame to both contain and leak visual information; and her keen awareness of photography's syntactical language, particularly the vernacular appeal of the snapshot. One piece in particular, Michael (1998), bears the influence of Christian Boltanski, whose use of close-up, blurred snapshots serves to universalize the individual and in so doing, allude to a greater human loss. Dolan also cites Uta Barth as an influence, whose focal and spatial manipulations—both within and between the frames—informs pieces like Michael (1998), Lipstick (1999), and Birds (2001).
When later pursuing her MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art, Dolan took a required video course and was soon captivated by the possibilities of sound. She discovered in the medium a means for extending the sequential presentation of her photographic work, giving it a more palpable, multi-dimensional presence. Narrative, albeit fragmented or disrupted, also assumed greater potential, given video's inherent reliance on sequential imagery and time. The films of Peter Greenaway, with their almost epic use of color, and those of Russian director AndrŽ Tarkovsky have made a great impact on the artist; as well as time-based works of artists such as Janet Cardiff, Pipolotti Rist, and Rodney Graham.
"I often begin with sound, and then move into imagery," says Dolan, which may account for the hypnotic visual quality of many of her pieces. The voices one hears in Dolan's works are often female, and often her own, or those of friends and collaborators. They are, when singing, clear and bittersweet, strong yet alone. They sing sad but hopeful songs, of romantic yearning (Blue Bayou, in Lake (2000); – or a vaguely familiar catholic hymn, in Solstice (1999) or spiritual salvation (Michael Row Your Boat Ashore, in Michael (1998). Like Astrud Gilberto and Karen Carpenter, whom she admires, Dolan conveys a fragile, searching quality with her voice that effectively contrasts with the more unsettling, and at times vicious, voices that chant, murmur, or whisper their words.
In addition to her own work, Dolan is actively engaged in the Kansas City art community. She is in her 2nd year as a full-time faculty member at the Kansas City Art Institute. She also co-curates time:base, a newly established entity that will promote video, sound, and internet derived installation work in Kansas City. Conceived and organized as part of the Urban Culture Project, time:base seeks to bring time-based and interactive artwork to a wider audience, organizing group exhibitions and site specific installations in various venues throughout the metropolitan area. Filmmaker Daven Gee and photographer/video artist Barry Anderson, both UMKC faculty, are co-curators. One of the trio's key objectives, says Dolan, is to secure funding to purchase the kind of equipment that time-based and installation art necessitates—and that few individual artists can themselves afford. Though many Kansas City galleries and museums are open to new media artists, most are ill equipped to show their work. time:base aims to remove that barrier, thus allowing new or emerging artists the opportunity to present their ideas, and in turn, encourage students to pursue new media as a viable means of creative expression. Opening the field to international, as well as local and national artists, will further secure Kansas City as a smart and vibrant contemporary art scene. The first exhibition will appear in early 2004, at a newly renovated space at the Boley Bank Building NW corner of 12th & Walnut streets in downtown Kansas City. (For more information www.time-base.org).
Having opportunities to make and show her own work, and to create similar situations for others, distinguishes for Dolan the particular allure of Kansas City for contemporary artists. "One of the exciting things about teaching at the Institute is being able to effectively encourage students to take their own initiative in this city—maybe open their own gallery—because they've seen their colleagues do it, and succeed." She further bolsters her students in new media to think of ways they might make their installations commercially practicable, a perennial conundrum for work that is not traditionally object-based. Dolan herself has recently begun making still images again. Rather than presenting them as two-dimensional surrogates for the actual experience, she views them as conceptual expressions of an overriding concern. As she succinctly puts it, "the idea is the commodity," and from that ideological base, the possibilities open wide. It is a testament to the caliber of the city's artistic community that Dolan is here, further raising the bar.
Appeared in ART, published by Grand Communications, a division of the Kansas City Star December 2003
Written by April Watson