Secrets of suburbia exposed in artist's love 'Quadrangle'

Quiet video installation tells the story of a tumultuous times

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, July 19, 2009

In an art exhibit brimming with the exuberant brio typical of emerging artists, visitors to "NAT 24: New American Talent, the Twenty-fourth Exhibition" at Arthouse drift back through galleries of the Congress Avenue contemporary arts center and find their way to a quiet bench.

Opposite the bench, a flat-panel video monitor hangs next to a half-dozen black-and-white photographs depicting what appears to be typical family scenes for suburban life in the early 1970s. Fathers with shaggy haircuts and wild print shirts hug wives in peasant blouses. Children play in neatly manicured front yards. On the monitor, overlapping diptych-style footage shows two people now in their mid-60s, one on each video channel.

The piece is "Quadrangle," a video installation by Austin filmmaker Amy Grappell.

The footage appears to be just innocuous interviews. But don the headphones to hear the soundtrack. What quietly unrolls in a 20-minute continuous loop is a compelling story about two middle-class professional couples — each with two young children — on Long Island. Encouraged by the free-love zeitgeist of the '60s and '70s, this pair of couples found a way out of their disappointing marriages by striking up an unusual four-way love affair. That affair eventually resulted in both families sharing a home — an oddity in suburban Long Island and far from the stereotypical notion of a hippie commune. But eventually the foursome's communal home fell apart, with both couples divorcing and marrying the opposite partner.

In "Quadrangle," Deanna and Robert, seen against the leafy yards and neat streets of Long Island, articulately reflect on what drew them into a complex relationship as a twentysomething middle-class married couple.

And in our reality television-blasted, social media-obsessed world where people seem all too eager to broadcast their most intimate thoughts and actions, "Quadrangle" proceeds in a remarkably subtle and quiet fashion. There's no salacious expos?, no emotionally charged confrontations and none of the self-indulgent navel-gazing that typically plagues confession-based contemporary art. Deanna and Robert emerge as likable, intelligent people judiciously reflecting on the choices of their past.

That authorial distance is admirable given that "Quadrangle" is Grappell's own story. Deanna and Robert are her parents and Grappell is one of the doe-eyed dark-haired little girls seen in the photographs. The photos were taken by Robert, Grappell's father.

Grappell, 44, had always wanted to tell the story of her parents and their unconventional choices. But it wasn't until a couple of years ago that she decided to give it a try. A decade in Texas far from her East Coast upbringing along with her own decision to marry for the first time a few years ago provided the necessary emotional break from her past. "I needed to feel that I had enough distance," Grappell says. "I didn't want this to be an indictment of my parents. I wanted it to be bigger than just my story. And that meant that I had to let my parents emerge as independent characters in the story and not let them be seen through a daughter's eyes."

Always admiring of the free-spirited experiments of the 1960s, Grappell says she nevertheless has always found it ironic that the great social and psychological tests of those times have mostly failed.

Grappell is one of 26 artists chosen from a pool of nearly 700 for "NAT 24." Arthouse organizes the survey of new national talent every summer, inviting a guest curator to make the selection. This year's curator was Hamza Walker of the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society, a contemporary arts center. Of the 26 artists in "NAT 24," 12 are from Texas, eight of whom are from Austin.

"Quadrangle" is Grappell's first video art work. Since landing in Austin in the mid-1990s after a decade as an actress with famed LaMaMa experimental theater troupe in New York City, Grappell has devoted her energy to filmmaking. Her documentary, "Light From the East," about a theater collaboration in the Ukraine during the collapse of the Soviet Union, aired on PBS. She also produced and acted in the feature film "Shady Grove" in 1996, which premiered at South by Southwest. Grappell also works as a casting agent, selecting actors for such films as Richard Linklater's "The Newton Boys."

Grappell says her parents were at first hesitant to participate in her documentary art project when she proposed it two years ago. So Grappell set up clear boundaries. Her parents were interviewed separately but each was asked the same questions. Cameraman Christian Moore shot the footage, and Grappell is never seen nor heard.

In fact, there's only subtle evidence in "Quadrangle" that gives the viewer any idea that the artist is a part of the story.

"I wanted the audience to connect with the characters independently and to make their own decisions about the story," Grappell says. "So I had to remain separate myself from the story."

Grappell is working on a feature film screenplay of her parents' story as well as developing "Quadrangle" into a more conventional documentary film. The whole process of making the video installation has proved cathartic for her and her parents, Grappell says. "In the end, it was healing for all of us."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699