SATURDAY, AUGUST 4:

Jason Mason is not a blow-hard. All too often, artists attempt to insert meaning into unapproachable, unaesthetic art with an overbearing artist statement. This is not the case in Mason’s show, The Iron Eye of Babylon. The show was carried by several medium- and large-sized photo realist paintings, rendered tenderly from photos Mason took of surveillance cameras. Mason’s treatment of the cameras almost personifies them. The light he uses is bright, natural and flattering, much like in portraiture. The surveillance cameras are never pointed at the viewer, instead always shown in 3/4 or profile views. This gives them a polite, ineffectual quality, dumbing down their place in our post-9/11/Big Brother culture. One painting is an exception: a depiction of a crooked, sinister camera dwarfed by the dome of the Texas state capital building, below a menacing smog-choked sky. This seemed to be Mason’s only painting with a sense of criticality toward its subject. To complement the surveillance theme, Mason installed a closed-circuit television system and a monitor displaying the views of four cameras placed around the gallery. Visitors happily clicked through the channels showing their friends drinking Tecate in front of Mason’s paintings. The video piece is a playful investigation into the irony of creating a feedback loop surveilling surveillance cameras. I appreciate a break from Foucaultian analysis and long discussions of the Panopticon—Mason deals lightly with a heavy subject. (LF)