Lucas Samaras at PaceWildenstein

All too often, technology-based art seems little more than a demonstration of what the medium will allow. Lucas Samaras has always taken a more playful approach, embracing technology's distortions and "mistakes" to make surprisingly compelling works of art. His "AutoPolaroids" of the late 1960s, for instance, took the then new technology of Polaroid film and pushed the wet emulsions around to create psychedelic self-portraits.

Recently he has turned his attention to digital imagery, exploiting the possibilities of iMovie, a program that comes with every Macintosh computer and is supposed to lead the user toward more sophisticated software. Samaras is quite content to use its flaws as well as its potentials, creating short films in which banal subjects are transformed into dazzlingly kaleidoscopic patterns and near abstractions.

This two-part show, titled "iMovies," presented some of his recent efforts in this vein. It was also a retrospective of sorts, presenting two new bodies of work that recapitulated many of the themes and images Samaras has explored over the years. Ecdysiast, a fancy term for a striptease performer, is a reversal of a series titled "Sittings" (1978-80) in which he photographed friends nude. Here, he presents a film of himself doing a leisurely striptease. The iMovie bump distortion filter introduces an odd swelling into the middle of the composition, creating warped images not unlike those found in funhouse mirrors. As Samaras disrobes, sits down and shifts in his chair, his body changes from Lucian Freud-style corpulence to Giacometti-like emaciation. Eventually, he puts his clothing back on and steps out of the camera's range.

This video was installed opposite a row of monitors showing the faces of various art-world luminaries, filmed as they watched this display. Since many of these individuals were featured as nudes in the original "Sittings," this new work is a witty inversion, turning the tables on the original voyeur.

The other works on hand presented visually enhanced and distorted short films of Samaras, his high-rise apartment and the view from his window. Subjects include the artist slowly eating a stick of celery, sipping a cup of coffee and slicing a strawberry. Others reveal the infinitesimal progress of a boat on the Hudson River, or the flashes of a lightning storm beyond his curtained windows. Combined with the dramatic crescendos of music by Sibelius, Chopin and Ravel, and transformed through digital wizardry into pixelated patterns, wavering pools of color and mirror images, these short films become far more than the sum of their parts.

There are echoes of the whole history of modern art here (Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, Surrealism). There are also echoes of Samaras's own history. The use of his home as staging ground recalls his re-presentation of his bedroom at the Green Gallery in 1964, the distorted self-portraits of the "AutoPolaroids" and the mirrored and pin-filled boxes that now seem to have expanded to become his living environment. The more Samaras forges forward, the more he rediscovers the roots of his art.

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