Su-Mei Tse at Franklin Art Works

Luxembourg-based Su-Mei Tse's cultural background is unusually broad: she was born in Luxembourg to British and Chinese parents, her first language was German and she studied in Paris. She was awarded a Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Biennale for her works in her country's pavilion, which consisted of room installations in different mediums, including the two digital videos (dated 2003) shown recently at Franklin Art Works. In Venice, they occupied adjacent rooms connected by an open passage; here they were projected diagonally across from each other on opposite walls of a modest-size gallery. In both venues, the soundtracks from the two videos were heard simultaneously.

The alpine cellist wearing a red tunic and black pants in Echo is not immediately identifiable as male or female, but a gallery handout identifies the musician as the artist herself. Her back to the viewer, she sits on a folding stool in the bright yellow-green grass of a mountainside meadow. She is alone, facing a distant rock escarpment; the scene is softened by a few trees and a wedge of sky at top right. She makes a few sweeps across the cello with her bow, and then she sits back to listen to the echo before taking it up again to continue her conversation with the landscape. The vastness of space, the warm sound of the instrument, the small motions of the diminutive player and the brevity of the loop contribute to a feeling of calm; the peace and grandeur of the mountainscape join with the human, expressive gesture in a beautiful whole.

The other video, The Desert Sweepers, also employs a grand space and a short loop. Here a population of identical men wearing green overalls and yellow-green vests and wielding plastic brooms--equipped like Parisian street-cleaners--intermittently sweep at the sand around them in the vast landscape, pause as if to consider, and then sweep again. Each figure has his own small sphere of action and does not move from it; the men are scattered from the immediate foreground to the extremes of perceptible distance. The only sound is the repetitive and rhythmically interrupted gritty scrunch of their sweeping. The task is futile, but, caught up in their immediate activities, they do not seem to despair.

Both of these works focus on immediate physical and sensory experiences. But both might easily be referring to the making of art.

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