Interventions/Jef Bourgeau
JEF BOURGEAU, born 1950
Drowning by Numbers, 1995
video assemblage
Bourgeau's installation sets up an intriguing interaction with The Massacre of the Innocents, a small Renaissance painting by Butinone on the opposite end of this wall. Combining contemporary technologies and ordinary objects, Bourgeau's work draws us into a contemplation of innocence and peril.
The work is first experienced as an auditory environment which moves and flows with sounds of nature and human life-whales, seagulls, children, and traffic.
The piece's visual element represents a shift in scale from the expansiveness of its sound to a fishbowl. Inside, a miniature video monitor plays tiny images of babies swimming under water. Only when we become aware of this element is the piece fully experienced.
The relationship between Bourgeau's installation and Butinone's painting is based on content. But while the Renaissance work narrates a specific event in Christian history, Bourgeau's reading of innocence and vulnerability is contemporary and elusive.
Courtesy of the David Klein Gallery
"Drowning by Numbers"
