Head trip Face to face with Portal’s ‘Conscience’ BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

To paraphrase Hemingway’s riposte to Fitzgerald’s famous line about rich people:Artists are different than you and I — they have more interesting ideas.

One of the notions of multimedia artist Neil Salley has become an installation piece that you can step into in the AS220 Project Space. Appropriately enough, the work is composed of ideas itself. Titled "Conscience," it consists of a circle of nine faces looking at you, surrounding you and giving advice.

No longer called the Foundation Gallery, the area to the left of the entrance of Rhode Island Foundation in Kennedy Plaza is now being occupied by AS220. The Empire Street art cooperative has contracted to curate the place for a year, independent of the foundation. Consider it upper-middle-class outreach.

When you step into the dark, high-ceiling room, your eyes drop to blue shimmering on the floor in the center of the circle, as though from moonlight on a wind-rippled pool.

"Originally there was my head in the middle," says Neil. "I was looking at these faces, but the viewer couldn’t experience all these voices because my head was there. So we knew, ‘OK, we can’t have my head there.’ "

The installation is the first collaborative effort of a trio that calls itself Portal. For "Conscience," Neil interviewed some of the people who are important in his life now, recording advice he asked for. Beth Burnett edited the interviews and added synthesizer music, for a quadraphonic soundscape of about 20 minutes. Robin Burnett, her husband, provided technical design and construction, and contributed feedback as an attentive viewer.

The rippling pool is part of the installation because, as Neil puts it, "there’s this cauldron of emotions bubbling." Beth sees the light effect as representing the subconscious, giving the role of ego to the viewer standing above it, surrounded by the superego of instructional voices.

"The content has become more accessible because of us working together in this way," Neil says. "I’ve been able to get down real deep, because of the way Beth has been able to put these pieces together to make sense, and Robin has been able to focus on making it accessible to anyone who walks in here."

The voices aren’t just an incoherent wall of sound. Beth has woven together a half-dozen vignettes, simulating the contrapuntal debates that go on inside our heads when we’re making decisions. For example, Neil’s grandfather speaks for a while, spouting cliched pronouncements — "Yesterday is gone and tomorrow will come and today is here" — until one snippet of advice sticks: "And always remember one thing: to be happy in this world, you have to be financially independent." Soon "you have to be financially independent" is alternating with the suggestion of a friend of Neil’s, that "you should keep going with your little inventions." Later, Neil’s wife Ingracia encouragingly notes that she sees things in black and white, "where you see things in lots of different colors."

"There’s my business partner Brian, juxtaposed with my creative collaborator Beth — they’re very, very different, but they’re both inside my head," Neil says, laughingly.

Others tapped include his son Tres, five when interviewed, and an artist friend, Manny, who is a musician. "He’s older than me, and he’s always a few steps ahead of me. He’s come to a point in his life where he had to kind of reel back on the art and put his family first."

Beth turns to Neil at one point and says, "I know you very well, so I organized it in a certain way. But it also wasn’t about you as much as that it could be about anyone." She turns from him and adds, "To me, it should be an experience where you go to the center of that circle and you can actually feel how Neil or any of us feel the tugging and pulling."

A decade ago Neil, 38, worked in New York directing commercials. "My stuff was pretty out there," he recalls. "I usually pushed the visuals." Beth has produced natural history videos that have been televised by National Geographic. She and Robin run Puddle Wonderful, a Tiverton-based company that does videos for non-profits. Robin, who as a marine biologist taught at Stanford, was one of the founders of the Monterey Aquarium, designing its first exhibits.

Neil has been making art and exhibiting at AS220 since 1988, when the Providence art space was on Richmond Street. Now his bread and butter work as a videographer includes contracting as cameraman for the Puddle Wonderful projects. Currently, he is looking to commercialize the "C360" displays in his installation, the suspended units in which faces appear to look at multiple viewers simultaneously. The technology allows for moving images to be addressing us.

This is just the beginning of Portal, which will present other collaborations in the future.