What you see above are two photographs of a recording studio. But I'm afraid you're not seeing them how the artist meant for them to be seen. Imagine them instead as gigantic framed prints, each one measuring about eight feet wide by six feet tall, and hung on angled walls. Or if you are anywhere near Vancouver, you don't have to imagine them, because that's how they are exhibited at the Western Bridge gallery.
The work is titled That's That's Alright Alright Mama Mama, by Vancouver artist Mark Soo. The effect, when viewed rightly (and with 3-D glasses, of course), is of looking through windows into the studio.
You might guess from the antique equipment that this scene was shot 50 years ago, but it was 2008. The artist built the set as a painstaking re-creation of Sun Records in Memphis in 1954, exactly the way it would have looked that July day Elvis Presley stopped in to lay down his first track, "That's All Right." The men in the studio that day had no idea they were making history, so they didn't take pictures. But now, thanks to Soo, you can be there yourself, at least in your imagination.
As the reviewer for Slog observed, this work is clearly a study in doubles. There are two photos, and each photo is itself really two photos. (All anaglyph 3-D images are made of two views, one for each eye.) Each picture shows two rooms: the studio with the recording equipment, and the sound-proof room through the framed window, where the musicians would perform. Every word in the title is doubled. The scene itself is a deliberate double of a scene from 50 years in the past. And in a sort of postmodern ironic way, all photos are doubles, because the prints you are viewing are duplicates of what the photographer actually shot.
I previously noted the exhibition of Jason Snell's 3D Girls and Guns exhibit this month in San Francisco. It is encouraging to see the world of fine art exploring the potential and the implications of 3-D anaglyphs. I hope to see more of this (and not just on the West Coast, please).
