By Paul Marx, News Correspondent
Bostonians know what it’s like to watch and to be watched.
Every day, thousands of people swarm their ways onto the T. They are a diverse lot, and in the varying lengths of time they spend commuting, they are all exhibits and observers.
This is the fundamental idea behind ‘Riders on the Train,’ the exhibition currently at the Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media in Jamaica Plain. Its professed aim is to explore ‘relationships between artist, audience, site, and context,’ according to the exhibit’s website. To do this, the exhibit features a rich assortment of media pieces that include photography, video, audio, and written works. Some are standard, some are not:’ There is a section in the exhibit that’s dedicated to photography taken from cell phones.
Such works serve purposes beyond being merely unconventional. Like it or not, public transportation is a highly personal experience:’ People are crowded into closed spaces, each involuntarily but inevitably inhabiting another’s personal bubble. Thus confined in each other’s company, the experience can become a claustrophobic one. The cell phone pictures capture this feeling of up-closeness with amateur perspectives and shrunken frames. Most of them seem to have been taken covertly; no one in the pictures is posing.
On the other side of the wall, a looping video imparts this bit of voyeuristic insight:’ ‘This morning, you’re seen, and unseen, and seen.’
As Exhibitions Coordinator Yuri Stone explained, the artists seek to comment on aspects of public transit that make commuters uneasy like surveillance, mundanity, and disquieting facelessness.
‘Also Stops Here’ briefly grasps at the conversations that are being overlooked in such non-interactions. The piece is a picture of a busy subway station, and amid the hustle two women stand out. Upon closer inspection, one can see their lives’ details printed over their silhouetted forms. One is a homesick Japanese beauty queen married to a renowned scientist. The other is an aspiring medical student who is too nice and has useless talents.
The exhibition’s immersive appeal is heightened by the fact that it is literally connected to the Orange Line’s Green Street Station. A piece titled ‘IN3DIA,’ a video-audio work in which a looping video, accompanied by a headset buzzing with quiet cacophony, mesmerizes the viewer with half-images of what may or may not be people, trains, and whatever else the view’s imagination can conjure. They are blurred and sliced with burning colors. Without warning, the ground rumbles as a train roars beneath.
Some of the works on display are admittedly abstract. Still, Stone said, ‘anyone can relate, since everyone rides the train ‘hellip; despite [the artworks] being abstract, they’re relatable.’
Relatable or not, as depicted in the exhibition, the riders stare impassively onto space. Boredom is the dominant facial expression. It would appear that they but have one thing in their minds: the destination. The very purpose that brings such people together ‘- to get from point A to point B ‘- is what separates them. They each have a story to tell, but no one is willing to tell it.
‘Riders on the Train’ is at the Axiom Center for New and Experimental Media, 141 Green St., Jamaica Plain, until Dec. 19. Open Tuesdays 2 to 5 p.m., Wednesdays 6 to 9 p.m., Thursdays, 2 to 9 p.m. and Saturdays 2 to 5 p.m. Free admission.
