In Jon Kessler's tumultuous The Blue Period installation at Berlin's Arndt & Partner, the New York artist trains a fleet of pivoting video cameras onto life-size, blue-streaked cutouts of gallery-goers, gallery walls smeared with denim-blue paint, monitors showing distorted media-culled imagery, and kinetic sculptures. Simulcasting these multimedia mise-en-scènes onto dozens of adjacent monitors, all in real-time, Kessler utilizes the live-feed cameras to place viewers within a chaotic collage. As in Dan Graham's Time Delay Room , Kessler creates dizzying false realities and unnervingly expands on the problems and pleasures of surveillance, continuing his focus on current affairs. Manipulating the three-dimensional reality of the gallery space, Kessler renders it into a grotesquely flat caricature, imitating how globally distributed imagery misrepresents actual events.

-SS