Well seasoned

A few years ago, video artist Sandra Binion was working on an installation in the Fine Arts Building. Out of the blue, Binion recalls, someone on the maintenance staff told her she should do a project on the four seasons. She didn’t think too much about it, but then a few months later the art collective Lucky Pierre invited Binion to be one of 30 artists creating a PowerPoint presentation for an eight-hour public performance. Each artist was randomly assigned one word, and Binion’s was seasons.

The idea for Seasons, Binion’s five-channel video installation showing at the Hyde Park Art Center, began to develop after that project when she began sifting through her video archive and discovered seasonal landscape imagery she had shot on various trips. There was the piece of footage from Italy in the summer of 2002, when her husband, sound artist Lou Mallozzi, was at the Bellagio Study Center, an artist residency near Lake Como run by the Rockefeller Foundation. Binion was exploring the manicured grounds of the estate with her video camera when she encountered the gardener, who had taken off his trousers and was raking in his boxers. The Kodak moment was captured but had yet to be incorporated into art. Binion also turned up imagery of spring flowers and footage shot from the window of a moving car on a wintery day.

The only thing missing was autumn. In the midst of this process, Binion says Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons—that masterpiece of Baroque music—naturally came to mind. In October 2004, Binion was visiting Ragdale, the artist community in Lake Forest. She went on a walk in the woods nearby with dancer Jon-Erik Andersson, and they came upon a pile of foliage. “I asked him to attack the leaves with dance,” Binion says.

With her four seasons in hand, Binion decided to work in Vivaldi. “I’m very attracted to the slow movements,” she says. Binion had a musician friend transcribe all the notes for those mellow parts, but as she began to work with the images, something was amiss. So she turned to Mallozzi, who then took that material and slowed it down further. “But it was still too referential,” Mallozzi says. “It was too much like a soundtrack.” He invited musician Fred Lonberg-Holm, the self-described “anticellist,” to come into the studio (the nonprofit Experimental Sound Studio, which Mallozzi founded) and record in a more improvisational way. They used fragments of the Vivaldi. “But we moved away from that even further into pure abstraction,” he says. Mallozzi says he wanted to make the sounds as tactile as Binion’s images.

Since Binion didn’t have HPAC’s facade in mind when she began creating Seasons, she found herself with an extra channel. The center’s 80' x 10' projection facade, on the front of the building, accommodates a five-channel projection system, and videos are visible from the street through five huge second-floor glass windows. Binion came up with an ingenious way to use the extra channel. The four projections last for two and a half minutes before shifting to the right—to the fifth frame—where viewers will see an accelerated montage of fragments of the other four video screens. The fifth frame acts as “a kind of conceptual clock, ”Binion says.

Seasons is at the Hyde Park Art Center through November 2. The artists’ reception is Sunday 23, 3 to 5pm. See listings.