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A supervisor’s no longer funding a South County council [9] N O V E M B E R

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Say it out loud [23]

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Force of

Artist Suzy Poling brings her views of the Earth to Cal Poly [14]

FILM Bum Rum [34]

BY ANNA WELTNER

Fees are going up in San Luis Obispo city [10] Schnupp’s Merriwinkle brings folktales to life [24] Raku brings Japanese fusion to downtown SLO [42]

spheres

The music of the

On the making of a geodesic art installation

A

phone conversation with experimental artist Suzy Poling is quickly derailed by a double rainbow she sees. But Poling has the ability to switch conversational gears so deftly and unapologetically that when the subject snaps from her solo show “Into the Center of the Earth” to the soaring apparition of violets and reds framing the sky, one hardly minds.

And anyway, when speaking of Poling’s latest show—the components of which are currently piled into the truck that is at the very moment of this conversation carrying her from the Bay Area to Cal Poly’s University Art Gallery— rainbows aren’t much of a deviation. We haven’t met in person yet, but within minutes I’ve simultaneously lit upon two oft-repeated Poling themes: diffraction and distraction.

There are elements of the mad scientist, and perhaps of the adventurer, in Poling’s work.

The Oakland artist has explored photography, collage, painting, sculpture, video, performance,

and light art installation. But Poling, who studied at Columbia College in Chicago, has also been creating unusual music under the moniker Pod Blotz since 2002, a direction she began pursuing while inhabiting an old Chicago movie theater (another story entirely), trying out her Moog synthesizer in the cavernous space. Strong interests in geometry, chemistry, and geology shape her attitudes toward art making, as do myth, fantasy, and science fiction.

But “Into the Center of the Earth,” she tells me, still careening down Highway 1, is special.

It’s the first show to cohesively join so many different aspects of her work, both in terms of medium and idea. And where many of her shows have been predominantly grayscale, this one bursts with prismatic color. It’s, in Poling’s words, “a study of refraction, reflection, and diffraction” used to imagine and depict what might lie beneath the earth’s crust.

At the show’s core is Yellowstone National Park, where Poling shot a series of photographs

BY ANNA WELTNER • PHOTOS BY STEVE E. MILLER

of geothermal features resting atop the Yellowstone Caldera, or Yellowstone Supervolcano.

The show’s concept, she said, stemmed from “coming close to [the geysers] and experiencing the reverence and beauty and the mystery. I was going there and really studying them at different times of the day: at sunrise, at sunset, in the middle of the day.

And then the light would hit and light up these caverns, and it would create different prismatic effects.”

A perfect example is a shot of a pool, ordinarily black, which the sun has momentarily revealed to be a deep emerald green.

“It’s literally darkness and light in combinations,” Poling said of the photograph.

“Mineral deposits and reflectivity. It just comes back to the prism, the basic piece of glass, and then the light coming through the pit of darkness—“it’s magic.”

Several of these Yellowstone photographs, alongside impossibly lovely shots of mineral deposits and algae blooms, were displayed as part of the April 2011 show “Natural Phenomenon.” It was during the week of that show’s opening that Poling came across an article reporting the Supervolcano to be immeasurably larger than scientists had initially believed. The artist often scours YouTube for documentations of eerie geographical oddities—she

educated me, for example, on Uzbekistan’s Door to Hell, a giant flaming cavern fueled by natural gas, and Russia’s Mir Diamond Pipe, a hole in the earth’s crust so large it creates a vortex that sucks in small aircraft. So her imagination was understandably kindled by the thought of a volcano extending deep into the center of the Earth. The exhibit is comprised of Poling’s playful postulations— expressed across a wide variety of media—about what this unknown, uninhabitable core looks like.

Day one: Into the center of the installation

But there was another unseen realm I was interested in, and it was that of the installationin-progress. It’s not often that one sees how a show as site-specific as Poling’s is put together: the concepts that are planned for months and tossed

DEEP SPACE Born in Michigan, educated in Chicago, and based in Oakland, artist Suzy Poling has explored photography, painting, light art installation, sculpture, and—as her alter-ego Pod Blotz—otherworldly music. At the heart of Poling’s current show “Into the Center of the Earth” are the geysers she photographed at Yellowstone National Park.

aside the day before the opening, the spontaneous decisions, the 11th-hour experiments with projectors and shards of mirrors, the little tasks that end up taking hours—like screwing those really old-school frames together, or peeling that sticky paper, in one piece, away from a large sheet of Plexiglas, which, it turns out, wasn’t even needed. It was the little annoying things I was interested in: the paint that won’t dry or refuses to adhere properly to those rubber balls that were supposed to be painted white and suspended from the ceiling yesterday. It’s the conversations, 24 hours before the reception, along the lines of, “Should we put up another wall over

here, or … ?”

So I asked Poling and gallery coordinator Jeff Van Kleeck if I could watch.

On Monday morning, Nov. 7, the pieces of the show were piled on tables and on the gallery floor.

Leaning against the wall were five dreamy, largescale photographs of geysers, as vibrant in color and abstract in composition as paintings. Next to them, in a pile, were 10 painted two-dimensional spheres, each overlaid with, Poling would later explain, a Wulff net—a projection of large and small circles (named for a Russian mineralogist), representing POLING continued on page 16 PHOTO BY SUZY POLING

IT’S MAGIC Pictured is one of Suzy Poling’s epic geyser photos.

POLING continued from page 15

lines of latitude and longitude across a sphere.

Mirrors and colored discs of various shapes were strewn across the linoleum next to an overhead projector and several colored transparencies, some painted, some printed with geometric patterns.

Poling, sporting tights and a T-shirt printed with one of her sweet geometric designs, enormous black-rimmed glasses, and a crystal-shaped jewel hanging around her neck, looked up from the organized chaos to greet me with a smile and, where many would be content to proffer a hand, a welcoming, impulsive hug.

She walked me through the elements of the show, including a short video she made featuring a nude model, wrapped in brightly colored fabric, falling repeatedly into water.

The video projection, and an overhead projection, would be cast against the walls, she said, the path of their beams intriguingly broken up by various suspended objects—mirrors, glass, white orbs. It’s the definition of diffraction, she explained: a wave hitting an obstacle.

(At this point, though, Poling was encountering an obstacle of another sort, namely, the frustrating, timeconsuming refusal of white paint to stick to the rubber balls that were to become

Light and magic

mysterious, suspended spheres. The paint cooperated only after several coats.)

It’s fascinating how big the gallery appears when empty, and how stark everything seems under bright overhead lighting. Incrementally, though, the exhibit began to take shape and fill the space.

Poling approaches the creative process much like a butterfly, dwelling intently

on one aspect, getting bored with it, and flitting to another, more interesting thing.

Ghost-hunting and other diversions

A shot Poling took in 2007 of an abandoned Ferris wheel entwined in a forest’s leafy embrace tells us a lot about the artist’s approach: that which was once possessed of a cycle all its own has been rendered still, and pulled into nature’s far more powerful orbit.

Themes of regeneration and natural cycles occur in many, if not all, areas of her work. This is evident in her

“Into the Center of the Earth” is on display at the University Art Gallery in the Dexter Building, room 171, on the Cal Poly Campus, through Dec. 2. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. through 4 p.m. Visit artgallery.calpoly.edu or call 756-1571 for more information.

past photography series “Dead Amusements”—the collection of grown-over amusement parks to which the Ferris wheel belongs— and in “Wonderland of Decay,” a series depicting depressing human institutions since reclaimed by nature.

“I started going to the abandoned mental hospitals with my friend,” she explained, placing strips of metallic tape over the corners of the overhead projector.

“And those were really beautiful and eerie, and I learned a lot about color and space.

We were kind of almost ghost-hunting at those hospitals. I’m still interested in them.

I’m just maybe not as interested in … .”

She trailed off, scanning the pile of reflective objects around her. Was she looking for a word or a physical thing?

“Detritus. The way that that all operates. But the main connection between all of my work is the understanding between cyclical forces, the connectivity and the rotation of everything. The decline of the detritus of a place or a thing and then the renewal, like it’s turning into something new. Like it’s the passageway.”

Day two: Down to the wire

I returned the following afternoon. This time, she was wearing red tights.

In other changes, the framed pieces had been hung on the walls the evening prior, and the orbs were now suspended from the ceiling. The idea of installing a wall (to separate the projections, which required a level of darkness, from the framed pieces, which needed track lighting) had been abandoned. The glass separating the Yellowstone photographs from the viewer was also conspicuously absent— despite the five pieces that had been cut and cleaned for that purpose. It had been determined that the glass detracted from

the subtle details of the photographs.

The video projection, which the day before had been a large square on the wall, had, through trickery of Poling’s metallic tape, been minimized to a fuzzy-edged oval, through which the colorful, floating woman peeked. Now, the moving image echoed the shape and hypnotic essence of the mysterious pools captured in Poling’s photographs, less a projection and more a magic portal.

By the time New Times staff photographer Steve E. Miller arrived to document the final product, Poling and Van Kleeck were putting the final touches on the installation. The detritus from earlier had been cleared away, leaving a pristine space. Shiny discs turned gently back and forth, refracting and reflecting.

The projection warped intriguingly as it hit the white orbs, giving them colorful skins. It was almost time for Poling’s artist’s talk, followed directly by the opening reception—an opportunity for guests to witness an utterly original environment that had, only a short time ago, existed partly in a pile on the floor and partly in Poling’s imagination.

“It’s really crazy when you think about what is beneath the surface of the Earth, what’s happening,” Poling reflected.

“It’s sort of the same thing as trying to document a black hole.”

Trying to depict the center of the Earth, she went on, “is just as abstract as looking at astral bodies. Looking into the interior of our plane … we just don’t know.” Δ Arts Editor Anna Weltner can be reached at aweltner@newtimesslo.com.