INCHOATE THOUGHTS
January 2, 2011
Charles
Sandison
Peabody
Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
October
2, 2010 – April 24, 2011
Follow
the signs through the galleries of ships’ models and Chinese export porcelain
to a stairwell where projections flicker across the wall above. Climb the
elegant stairs and emerge in a Federal style chamber, some 120 feet long, 50
feet wide, and 20 feet high. The arched windows are blocked. The only light
comes from 16 projectors, ten at dado height, six at the cornice below the
coved ceiling. They cast tumbling words, red or white, on walls, ceiling, and
floor. The words appear handwritten, for Charles Sandison
scanned them from eighteenth and early nineteenth-century ships’ logs and
customs manifests. Groups of raw pixels swirl among the ever-shifting words.
They resolve into log entries—“The First Part Fresh Breezes & Squally”—and
diagrams of navigational calculations. These hold steady among the constantly
stirring words before bursting into brilliant spume.
East
India Marine Hall, completed in 1825, is far from empty. Sandison’s
ever-shifting light falls on portraits of ships’ captains and merchants who
founded Salem’s East India Marine Society in 1799. It falls, too, on wall cases
of curios these voyagers brought back from the South Seas and China, where they
traveled in pursuit of trade and profit. The projected light also bathes nine
carved and painted ships’ figureheads, each surging forward from the wall that
supports it.
This
installation, the first in a series of contemporary art interventions at the
museum, marks an advance on Sandison’s earlier
computer generated data projections, for it marries theme and form perfectly. Sandison has contrived a phosphorescent sea in ceaseless
motion using an algorithm derived from weather data streaming in real time.
Words—some in Arabic—change direction as though caught by a shift in wind or
current. The artist has incarnated nautical memory of frail humans attempting
to give shape and order to elemental flow through language and math in the
great age of sail. Yet the images that froth and eddy imply more besides. They
seem emanations from the room, its contents, and its absent original occupants.
A grant of extra-sensory perception has seemingly made visible all those
intangibles that accompany the portraits and keepsakes. We are lent a vision of
ectoplasmic emanations from these things, which find
evanescent embodiment in a matrix of wave and wind that stirs an ocean of human
traces from long ago.
A
display in an adjacent gallery, organized by Samuel Scott, associate curator of
maritime art and history, complements Trevor Smith’s curatorial realization of Sandison’s vision. In Written
on the Waves: Shipboard Journals and Logbooks, we can examine the very
documents that Sandison scanned. Who could fail to be
stirred by the entry in the logbook of the American privateer Tyrannicide
describing a chase “within Gun Shott” in 1779,
resulting in the disastrous springing of her main mast? We can read the very
words, inked at sea and bound in coarse sailcloth, now cast by Sandison on the ceiling of East India Hall.