Parallax by Mark Allen Soderstrom at Humboldt State University's Reese Bullen Gallery

by Katherine Almy

 

When Mark Allen Soderstrom was five or six years old, he took his first photograph with his grandfather's

Agfa 120 box camera. A scene from the beach at Monterey Bay Academy in California, the photograph shows

the impossible. In it, there are two suns in the sky. Soderstrom wondered at that throughout his childhood.

As a student at Humboldt State University, he studied photography and printmaking, and it was there that he

learned about double exposures, the process that exposes one piece of film two times resulting in two overlapping

images. It still took several years of closely examining his photograph for him to accept that this was indeed what

caused the two suns in the image.

It is this picture, greatly enlarged, printed on rag paper and titled Unringing the Bell that introduces the concept of

Soderstrom's show, Parallax. “The apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of

the observer,” is the dictionary definition of the word. What one sees is dependent on ones position. It is also

dependent on one's beliefs, experience, hopes and fears, and this is what interests the artist and drives his

imagination.

There are many layers of meaning and implication in all of Soderstrom's pieces; so rich, in fact, that one leaves

feeling overwhelmed with the possibilities. Aside from his own childhood myths, he takes on several from history

and religion. Flying Belt, a construction of leather and steel that holds numerous glass vials full of dew, references

an obscure tale of unknown origin. The story, according to Soderstrom, goes like this: a learned man sat in a field

at dawn. As the sun came up and shone upon the dewy blades of grass a peculiar thing occurred. The dew began

to release itself from the grass and float upward. The man's hypothesis, that dew is a substance that when

illuminated by sunlight, becomes lighter than air, leads him to believe that if he could fashion a belt affixed with

bottles of dew, then he could use it to fly.

Soderstrom's Divining Rod blends ancient technologies with modern ones, as a traditional forked stick is fitted with

a modern electronic hygrometer. His interest here is the way in which natural phenomena are defined as supernatural

until a scientific explanation is found, and the fact that even at this point, many are inclined to deny the rational

explanation and hold onto their supernatural explanations. This, of course, directly parallels Soderstrom's own

experience with the two suns in his photograph. Even after learning about double exposures, he found it difficult to

let go of the notion that something magical had occurred that day.

In this way, Soderstrom show goes back and forth between his own personal myths and those of society, making the

connection between the dreams of the individual and the collective dream of the people.

Bionic Reliquary enshrines a “sacred” artifact from Soderstrom's childhood – a magnet that he was told would develop

his bionic powers if he wore it in his shoe. “I wasn’t sure if it was working or not. I just really, really wanted it to be true,”

he states in his description of the piece. Which begs the question, how much of our convictions are based on what we

“really really want,” rather than fact. And what is fact? Is it what we see? If so, how do we determine fact when our

vision is clouded by our desires?

And thus, the questions fly as one goes from piece to piece. With no direct reference to current events, Soderstrom's

show is timely in its examination of world views. “My interest,” he says in his statement, “is in examining how

individuals and cultures come to various understandings and how those perspectives are perceived from opposing

paradigms.” As the world diminishes and cultures are thrown together, the ancient wisdom of one culture is thrown into

question by another. How firmly we cling to our cherished beliefs and how willing we are to see the world with fresh

eyes may determine our survival as a species. Through his work, Soderstrom is determined to unravel and question his

own perceptions, and he invites the viewer to do so as well.