In ancient Greece, the Pythia—the woman charged with
transmitting the Oracle—descended into a temple that sat on the
intersection of two fault lines in the earth. What happened once she
got there is the subject of argument, but basically it involved
divinity and drugs. She saw the present, past, and future all at
once; she spoke in tongues or with her own voice and vocabulary; she
probably was high on gas hissing out from the cleft in the planet. A
perfect confluence of the spiritual, the geological, and the physical
produced this revered wisdom. But how do you crack things open given no chasm, no cleft? No Chasm, No Cleft: That’s the title
of Brendan Jansen’s first solo at Crawl Space Gallery, a show of five
videos and two chalk drawings.
What you see in No Chasm, No Cleft is hard to describe; it
involves the cutting and slicing and reuniting of photographs and video
frames that feature landscapes, people, Jansen’s studio, and sculptures
and shapes he’s made. Oedipus Whatever is a double video
portrait of Jansen’s face superimposed on his son Sterling’s face, both
rotating back and forth as if on digital spits. Their faces are
striped because their visages have been vivisected and then put back
together again—Jansen videotaped Sterling passing under a sliver
of light, then pulled frames from the video and rebuilt them into a new
animated image. I can’t help but associate it with science’s search for
wisdom in the Visible Human Project, begun in the 1980s: Male and
female cadavers were vivisected (the male sectioned at one-millimeter
intervals, the female every one-third millimeter), each slice was
photographed, and the images were rejoined to create the first
digitally traversable 3-D humans. To know it is to cut into it. There’s potential violence in curiosity, but what else do we have?
Another video, thinkingdeeplyaboutimportantthings,
depicts a skull that spins like a planet (as the world
turns…)—or like the bodies on the screens of cosmetic surgeons
in movies or boys with fantasies and computers. (Remember the
spinning digital webby-grid version of Kelly LeBrock in Weird
Science?) An unlit drawing in white chalk on a dark panel depicts a
baby’s face, upside down, taking its first screaming breath, the
rest of the baby still inside the woman whose legs stretch sketchily
toward the viewer in the darkened gallery (there are no overhead
lights, only ambient light from the videos).
No chasm, no cleft (Chaco Canyon) is a prismatic patchwork of
a video depicting the New Mexican national park, once a center of
Puebloan culture. The naturally sedimentary landscape—packed not
only with geological history but also archaeological artifacts—is
probed and paralleled by Jansen’s refracted view (which is also
reminiscent of David Hockney’s optical experiments in painting and
photography). Jansen is seeking wisdom, ideals, transcendence. After a graduate-school dalliance with
proficient but moribund surrealism, Jansen is creating cracks in a
search that feels real and personal. You never know quite what will
manifest when something is broken apart. 
