Throughout December, San Francisco-based artist JD Beltran’s public video projection Portal (2011) is visible in the evenings in downtown San Jose, at the intersection of Almaden Boulevard and East San Fernando Street. Projected from the median onto the windowless exterior of a twelve-story AT&T building, Beltran’s video draws on the local discovery of fossilized remains from a 14,000-year-old juvenile Columbian mammoth, now known as Lupe. Portal mines this recent discovery to explore our relationship to time and place through a collection of morphing images visible in the space of a red light.
Commissioned by the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose as a public project to compliment the exhibit Mammoth Discovery!, which explores Lupe’s discovery, this project also includes Beltran’s short film Journey (2011), visible on a flat screen in the City Windows Gallery at San Jose City Hall. Both the video and the film can be viewed in transit. Each offers an astonishing realization about the public space in which they are viewed. This urban environment was once roamed by mammoths, among other extinct animals, such as Saber-toothed Cats and American Mastodons, prior to the most recent prehistoric glacial episode known as the Pleistocene Epoch.
This Ice Age didn’t occur in some remote locale, accessible to us only through a dusty textbook, but rather, it occurred here. The tusk found in the sandy banks of the Guadalupe River in 2005, by San Jose resident Roger Castillo while out walking his dog, collapses the distance between our understanding of history and our experience of it. Beltran’s film and video challenge the viewer to reconsider their surroundings in this context and offer a glimpse of the uncanny reality embedded in the Bay Area landscape.
still from Portal
Portal is a composite video of digital stills and moving images that loops every three minutes and three seconds. The images segue from a fiery sun (4.5 billion years old and visible to us every day) to a sundial (first thought to have been invented 3,500 years ago) to the first clock to the first digital clock to the iPhone, and continuing on to explore time through similar relationships. The last half of the video samples images of eyes from ancient paintings to silent films to today. A subtle thread runs through Beltran’s choices and illuminates our expectations around globalism and advancing technologies as a way of life. A note on the project website, alongside a smartphone image, indicates a decline in the once ubiquitous wristwatch. Once commonplace, it has been made nearly obsolete. Over time, everything in our surroundings changes — and our sense of permanence, we are reminded, is but a brief moment in the larger scheme of things.