Night & Day Events

10 Wednesday
Ever since the gallery openings in early September, people have been talking about the exhibit at the Society of Contemporary Photography, 2012 Baltimore. That's because the light boxes with moving photographs in New York artist Ted Victoria's Is Anyone Home? are aesthetically pleasing, wonderfully fascinating and head-scratchingly confusing. Objects inside the light boxes appear to be moving because of the combined efforts of a camera obscura, mirrors and mechanical devices. The glowing projections tend to be mostly still, with one isolated frame of motion (often a television screen) or object in motion (in the image titled Still Alive, it's a lobster). In "Watching Television on LSD," the back of a couch in the foreground indicates a cozy interior, while the TV in the background plays reels of Fox 4 News -- except the two-dimensional screen depicted appears distorted, as an image on a hologram might. In "Watching Television on LSD II," the main difference is that we seem to have upped the dosage of drugs, since the figures on the screen are now just moving outlines of people, and most of what we see is trippy static. Inspired by the way mass media bombards us with visual stimuli, Victoria says, "You might pass through images that are tragic and horrible, only to find yourself in the next second in the middle of a mindless sitcom. My work has that versatility about it." The show ends next week, and today's hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 816-471-2115.