Gotham Dispatch

Video projections by Tim White

Max Henry

With the war in Kosovo everywhere on the news, the pair of video projections by Tim White at Alexandre de Folin in Chelsea seems very much to the martial point. Using WWII documentary clips to a realistic effect, Presence (1999) is a sequence of grainy frames showing the trajectory of aerial bombs landing and exploding in the distant landscape below. Abandonment of El Alamein -The Runner (1999) shows a blurred soldier running across a smoky battlefield towards an unknowable fate.

Both projections are trapezoid-shaped and bathed in an Yves Klein blue light, heightening their dramatic mood. In an adjacent room were large color photographs that freeze the digitally altered images into pointillist fields of texture and color. The overall effect is one of detachment from horror, the kind of feeling engendered by war films like Apocalypse Now or Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory. White gives his installation a haunting, elegiac quality with the addition of a low-decibel soundtrack of bombs exploding and the heavy breathing of a lone running soldier. This compelling show is among the season's finest so far.