Ginger Andro, Chuck Glicksman, and Mark Ari conceived Colossus as the second installment in a series of scent-suffused multimedia installations deliverable by mail. Focusing on the Statue of Liberty, that iconic monument in New York Harbor that has greeted immigrants for nearly a century and a half, the artists probe its alluring promise of freedom, democracy, and a better life.
In collaboration with Olfactory Art Keller, the artists migrate the original experience into a communal event of sound, poetry, projection, and scent.
With Ginger Andro’s support, participants may create a roll-on blend from some of the essential oils used in Colossus. They may also take home the original mail art.
“Jumping Hurdles” 2013-2022 is a motorized praxinoscope on a steel stand made with hand colored prints on watercolor paper, mirror, mixed media and shown with an original scent composition evoking open pastures and equestrian memory and the feeling of freedom. As an homage to Muybridge, Jumping Hurdles brings us to the elemental through low-tech and pre-cinema invention. A reminder and reflection on persistence of vision phenomenon in an over-stimulated time.
The Crossing- 4 channel video projection, mirror, sound, scent and multi-media elements, size-variable 2008
Ginger Andro and Chuck Glicksman have wrestled with in creating their multi-media presentation “The Crossing”, one of the most interesting works of this type I have seen in perhaps ten years and one of the few that can appeal across a wide age range and to both the knowledgeable and the non-initiate. The piece has the startling originality, employing a simple conceit executed with the consummate skill, that marked, for instance, the first pieces of Amy Jenkins at the Anna Kustera Gallery when it was in Soho years ago. And it has none of the self-congratulation that seems to infect almost everything that young video artists seem to think is necessary to make a career, if not a point. Andro studied with Alan Siegel and Vito Kasuba, while Glicksman was a student of the filmmaker Ken Jacobs, known for the rigor and humor of his structuralist films. This training is evident in the collaborative work Andro and Glicksman have been making. In a number they have included not only video and sound, but also scents, something that only Ernesto Neto has been successful with recently. For The Crossing, a pièce d'occasion designed to celebrate the 125th Anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge, they nearly fill a gallery with cords and other sculptural elements that simulate the feeling a the guy-wires and supports that are a central feature of the bridge, this reflected in mirrors placed in such a way that the visual perception is expanded almost infinitely. Utilizing four projectors, they shine footage both original and archival into the space, through which viewers may walk, surrounded by an odor redolent of the city's waterfront and the wafting sounds of the metropolis--or the delighted murmurs of visitors. The centerpiece of the projection is film footage, colorized and carefully spliced and repeated, of an 1899 film by Thomas Edison, New Brooklyn to New York via the Brooklyn Bridge, depicting a magical crossing of this most iconic of structures. Immersed in its magic, participants in The Crossing are transported to that realm of imagination that the bridge itself has long inspired.
Larry Qualls, columnist, ART ON PAPER