The digital works themselves are constantly moving, forcing the viewer to stay in place in order to fully understand their scope. Yet the installations fit into a whole that is simple in its complexity, bringing together nature, symmetry and familiar stories.
Korot, who has worked primarily with video since the medium's roots in the 1970s, also incorporates older forms of storytelling in her work. Video, print and weaving are all connected through the fundamental unit of the line, and it is this theme that resonates throughout her works at the gallery.
"All three [mediums of storytelling] encrypt information in lines," Korot said. "Weaving and text even have the same roots text and textile a web, texture, structure, raveling and unraveling."
Korot often layers these mediums, finding new ways to coil together their individual messages and create a dialogue between the three that cannot be ignored.
In a piece titled "FLORENCE," Korot extracted phrases from the memoirs of Florence Nightingale to form a soliloquy. Set against a digital backdrop of woven lines on top of video clips of snowstorms and waterfalls, Nightingale's words fall at various speeds to the bottom of the screen, though her descriptions of wounded soldiers and the scars of the battlefield surely will stick in the minds of gallery attendees.
"I was interested in someone who went beyond fear, someone who was so young and went off to war to save soldiers," Korot said.
Korot's use of various mediums also marks the passage of time, from the days of traditional weaving to our current of use modern visual technology.
"It's really inventive, the way she uses weaving and images that are hundreds of years old," studio art senior lecturer Gerald Auten, who is directing the exhibition, said. "It's something so ancient used today with our technology."
Korot's series of works based on the story of the Tower of Babel began with her first handwoven canvas that translates the entire tale in her own alphabet. Each letter is coded on a four-point square until her "words" fill up the entire canvas, creating a tapestry of black dots.
"It's what thought looks like devoid of meaning," she said.
The canvas was the springboard for further projects, including a digital 48-foot-wide scroll and an ink printout of that same scroll, both on display at the gallery. The scroll integrates three languages the phonetic Roman alphabet, which tells the tale; Korot's coded language, which illustrates the events through pictograms; and black shadows beneath everything else that depict Egyptian figures, the last of which ironically sits at a computer. These visual themes link back to the story of the Tower of Babel itself, which details technology's impact on humans.
The most playful piece in the exhibition is "Yellow Water Taxi," a digital piece that follows four rows of ferries as they enter the screen one-by-one and slowly add color to the scene. Korot filmed these taxis on the Hudson River as she was taking a walk in lower Manhattan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Korot, who lives in New York, said that it was important for her work to be locally inspired.
Despite its somber undertones, "Yellow Water Taxi" is actually the most colorful work in the exhibit, filled with blues and yellows. Resembling a moving watercolor, it brings to mind the innocent joy of a child's painting. There is a sense of peacefulness and quiet as the ferries pass along the screen.
Korot, who studied literature in college, said she learned art mostly by relying on herself.
"I had many teachers but I sought them out," she said. "When I needed to learn to weave or put together the technical aspects of my art, I would go straight to the sources."
Although her exhibits require significant technical work, Korot often prepares it herself, fostering the same relationship a painter has to his studio and materials.
"It makes me feel like I really know my tools, and that there's no one between me and my work," she said.
In 1970, Korot was co-editor of Radical Software, a magazine that focused on the relationship between artists and new media. She was later involved in multiple channel installations, which veered away from the passive one-on-one viewing experience between television and audience and instead presented viewers with four or five moving screens. In the 1990s, Korot exhibited two video operas, which contrast theater with technology by placing actors in front of screens as they perform.
With a career that has now spanned more than four decades, Korot has also witnessed the transformation of the technology that she incorporates in her work, much of which is created on the computer with after-effects.
"In a way I feel I was waiting for the computer for me to work the way I wanted to," Korot said. "It creates a complex moving image but still [gives me] control."
Auten noted that Korot's fusion of mediums and choice of stories reflect how we look at time and language.
"It's really poetic and so much more than it is at first glance," Auten said. "I've been with this work for 10 days and it just keeps unfolding. It's what art should do."
"Beryl Korot: Video Text/Weave/Line" will be on view at the Jaffe-Friede Gallery until Dec. 4.
