By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008

The University of Maryland's Art Gallery has been temporarily turned into the Museum of Dying Technology.

That, at least, is the impression a casual visitor to its two current art exhibitions might take away. Photographs of old celluloid movie film, gracefully unspooled in calligraphic loops, greet you at the door, along with pictures of library card catalogue labels (typewritten). Farther back, you'll find a wall of found objects: rusted farm implements, canning jars and yellowing snapshots. Opposite those sit three whirring cassette decks. In the corner, a photo booth. On another wall are photographs of buildings slated for renovation. What exactly is going on here?

More than meets the eye.

Yes, the theme of obsolescence is hard to miss. But it's not the only one, or even the main one, in this pair of thematically linked shows. Rather, the theme is the passage of time itself.

Take Lynn Cazabon's photos of film. They're part of the artist's ongoing "Discard" project, in which she documents, among other things, movies that have been "de-accessioned," meaning marked for the dumpster, by such public institutions as the National Archives. (The title of the show, "Lynn Cazabon: The Archive's Shadow," is a play on the fact that the Art Gallery is a neighbor of the Archives' College Park facility.) On the one hand, they evoke Wolfgang Tillmans's navel-gazing photographs of photographic paper, on view last year at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Art looking at art, in other words.

Yet in several of Cazabon's pictures, which have an abstract beauty that goes beyond their dry subject matter, you can also just make out the images on the film itself. This lends the work a flavor of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose pioneering motion studies of the late 19th century (shot with sequential still cameras, not film) famously documented such actions as a horse galloping or a man jumping. Muybridge, in short, shot pictures of time. Cazabon shoots pictures of pictures of time.

The Art Gallery's back room is devoted to a group show called "To Remain." Its theme, like Cazabon's, is leftovers.

Don't turn up your nose, though.

Among the show's standouts is Mandy Burrow's "The Elko Farm Project." Installed earlier this summer on the site of a small family farm in Virginia, it includes a hodgepodge of photos, clothing and tools collected from various sources by the artist. Taken out of their original context, its artifacts invite the kind of educated guesswork that archaeologists use. Its storytelling calls to mind a vanishing America, but one that exists only in our imaginations.

The artist known as Jason.Sloan also plows the fields of memory. Three photographs, accompanied by three dual-cassette decks, depict fields where the artist has spent time: one near his childhood home, one near his college dorm and one near Stonehenge. But the photos are doctored: Horizontal stripes, like erasures, appear in them. In a process that he keeps deliberately vague, Sloan manipulates the images, digitally removing visual data and translating it into sound. The unearthly hissing that visitors listen to on headphones is a mix of that visual information translated into audio and sound that the artist recorded on-site.

It's uneasy listening. The fact that it's on magnetic tape guarantees that, like these photos, like all artlike memory itself, the sounds will only further decay over time.

Lynn Cazabon: The Archive's Shadow To Remain Through Oct. 17 at the Art Gallery at the University of Maryland, 1202 Art-Sociology Building, College Park Phone:301-405-2763 Hours: Open Monday-Saturday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Wednesdays until 6 p.m. Price: Free