Dubitatio

Conflation of time, kinetic sculpture, media, process, science, nostalgia, and a little mysticism all get thrown into the mix in Mauricio Ancalmo's show Dubitatio. The centerpiece of the installation is a "sculpture" made of five different 16mm film projectors stacked on top of one another. Running through these projectors, in an elegantly confusing manner, are hundreds of feet of looped found footage — black and white scenes of Vladimir Horowitz playing the piano and what appear to be native Africans playing drums — which Ancalmo contact-printed in somewhat random fashion onto five separate loops. On top of this is a soundtrack of noises picked up by a radio telescope.

Flanked around the sculpture and its projections are large framed digital prints of 16mm film scans that read as colorful abstractions. The sections of film used in these scans are the result of experiments and performances Ancalmo conducted — ranging from running film through a sewing machine to scratching the film's surface with a turntable hooked up to medical imaging equipment — and the final images were then manipulated through digital means.

At the heart of Ancalmo's work are ideas about how visuals are articulated as sounds, and in turn how sounds may manifest themselves as retinal. The interesting thing is not that he speculates fictionally about these things, but that he gives us proof of them as the residue of an experimentation that falls somewhere between scientific and engineering. Dubitatio, Latin for aporia, is the expression of doubt over one's ability to establish the truth of a proposition. There is no doubt about the truth of Ancalmo's exhibition; the doubt lies in our ability to grasp it.

— Rives Granade, San Francisco Examiner, October 2009 (excerpt)