Frank Gillette's Spectra Obscura Sounds the Alarm at Microscope Gallery

By Daniel Okafor

Frank Gillette's Spectra Obscura is open at Microscope Gallery, and the first thing you meet isn't a picture. It's sound. Field recordings from the woodlands and beaches of Eastern Long Island mix with percussion, melodic tones and distorted electronics, greeting the visitor as a hushed ambient medley.

The audio belongs to The Symbiotic Blues (2017–22), a trilogy of three-channel video works running the length of the gallery's east wall. It resonates subtly through the whole exhibition, building an acoustic texture that matches the layered visual worlds on screen.

Since the 1960s, Gillette has been building an ecology of his own — piercing video and media works full of strata, sharply tuned to the entanglements between nature, culture, and the devastation humans wreak upon the biosphere. That's a long career of looking at what we're losing. The show doesn't look away.

What's on view?

The works in Spectra Obscura — videos and Polaroids — express distinct sorts of disappearance, decay and fleeting natural phenomena. Elegiac, urgent, infinitesimal. Three adjectives, one verdict: this is an artist cataloguing endings.

The single-channel video Symptomatic Syntax (1981) sets the tone. It features close-ups of slowly shifting aquatic environments (underwater habitats filmed in tight detail), accompanied by sounds of running water. An intermittent voice-over delivers lines from J.M.E. Taggart's 1908 book The Unreality of Time. A philosopher who argued time isn't real, laid over water that very much is. Gillette has been reading the right shelf.

Why the sound matters

Placing the trilogy's soundtrack at the entrance is a curatorial choice with teeth. The visitor walks into a wood-and-shore soundscape before seeing a single frame — nature arrives acoustically, then disappears visually across the works. It's a neat inversion, and a pointed one. You hear the biosphere first; you watch it fade second.

The comparison worth making: Gillette's strata work like geological core samples, each layer recording a moment of loss rather than sediment. That's the show's quiet argument — media art as evidence.

For a artist who has worked in video since the medium's American infancy, Spectra Obscura confirms the through-line: nature, culture and ruin, stacked and tuned. Whether the trilogy's final chapters point anywhere new is the question his next outing will have to answer.