Local artist and inventors came forward with everything from mechanical narwhals (basically a absurdist version of the mechanical bull) to tightrope sliding jesters to pendulum based drawing machines.  The works were all in motion on their own accord and begged for participation; all the while holding down the characteristic NOLA post-industrial aesthetic.  The show is, after all, held in a (barely) converted warehouse.

The idea that it was not just a show for artists, as curator Myrtle von Damitz noted in her statement, was maintained by the work and the audience’s reaction.  It was more a question of participation than contemplation.

A small jump, physically and conceptually, from Automata is Antenna Gallery’s newest installment Projection Bias.

The show is about projection, the Freudian kind and the film kind.  Robin Wallis Atkinson, the shows curator, selected works from Courtney Fathom Sell, Stephen Kwok, and Michael Anderson that fit into the medium and challenge the viewer to go beyond initial reactions and personal bias to “focus on what something actually is.”

Sell’s piece Erotic Symphony is a mash up of two videos.  It shows documentation of a man in a transparent plastic mask awash in abstract layers paired with video footage of VHS porn edited to little more than fuzzy black and white images.  The idea behind it being that, although bodies are not obvious in the abstracted pornos, the movement will still be there.  Sell explained that he intends to “challenge notions of erotica” with these masked images.

If Sell’s Symphony challenges our perception by presenting something unrecognizable that we contemplate through the process of identifying it, Anderson’s piece works in the opposite direction.  Presented with catalogue stock photo images of a model in an array of poses and tight sportswear, we are asked to realize the absurdity of a mundane image by looking at it repeatedly and frankly.

Kwok also does a great thing with a projector.  In one of his three pieces he puts three public school pre-digital era projectors on the floor casting a question on the wall, What if you’re not special?  The projectors on the floor, however, offer other questions and varying degrees of being special.  His work deals with insecurity and, what Atkinson describes as, “questions of personal and social identity.”

Plus with all the lights off and Anderson’s sinister soundtrack playing, it feels good in there.

Automata is on view/ the machines are running only at the closing event through/on May 8 at