'Firebird'
Through May 22, Braunstein/Quay Gallery

IN "Firebird," his exhibition at Braunstein/Quay Gallery, Paul DeMarinis traces the intersection of science, art, and politics through a body of work that examines the appearance of speech as a visual image. The show includes pieces constructed in two principal ways. Four are built from delicate birdcages with distinct, tin ventilation tops. Between the bars of each cage, in the place of a perch, are two carbon-coated cables suspended just above the flame of a propane torch. When the torch ignites, it heats the cables and triggers a recording of Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, or Hitler, for whom the four pieces are named. The sound is carried by the flame itself – and only by the flame. Accompanying the world leaders' speeches are anthems and roaring crowds mixed with recordings of birds. The torches fire at random intervals and at times overlap, creating a cacophony of fanfare, rhetoric, and birdcalls. The second set of works was constructed using a primitive, 19th-century phonological device that measures sound waves by reading the distortions they produce in a gas flame. DeMarinis played sound clips from George W. Bush's speeches about the war in Iraq into the machine and captured the results with a stop-motion camera, producing visual documents that ominously look like horizon lines of flickering fire. The show raises questions concerning the constitution of modern political authority and the power of, and what DeMarinis presents literally as, inflammatory speech. The flames speaking in the birdcages evoke the figure of the Holy Ghost, but the haunting sense produced by the work ultimately bears the burden of history rather than religion. The flickering flame causes the tape to sputter like a broken message from the past picked up from the airwaves by some accident of physics. And a similar tension between past and present is produced by the juxtaposition of the two sets of work. However, the connection drawn doesn't identify Bush with the heroics of WWII, as he himself is prone to do. Rather the specter of the flame recalls the firebombing and incinerators of that war, which compromised any sense of heroics and revealed the terrible danger in nationalism and imperialism. In a highly refined but ultimately terrifying way, DeMarinis's songbirds seem to be modern-day Cassandras attempting to convey a warning. Tues.- Sat., 11 a.m.-5:30 p.m., 430 Clementina, S.F. (415) 278-9850. (Clark Buckner)