Confinement and Solitude: Feeling ‘The El Nin~o Effect’

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s “The El Nino Effect” evokes an impressive range of perceptions and emotional reactions: relaxation, pleasure, curiosity, fear, claustrophobia, release. What’s so remarkable is that this grand theater of the mind takes place while you remain completely enclosed in a sensory deprivation tank that’s slightly smaller than a compact car.

In the main room of Christopher Grimes Gallery, two pod-like chambers lie side-by-side like twin portals to a mysterious netherworld. On a rear wall, a pair of small video monitors displays a continuous time-lapse loop of storm clouds traveling briskly across the U.S.-Mexican border. The sound of gunfire, digitally altered to suggest a pounding rainstorm, blares periodically from a set of speakers.

Although the stark, geometric simplicity of Manglano-Ovalle’s sleek white flotation chambers hearkens back to Minimalism’s heyday, “The El Nin~o Effect” is not an aesthetic object to be contemplated in the traditional sense. Instead, it transforms the public setting of the gallery into a place where your body, rather than the artwork, lies at the transcendent center of the experience.

Manglano-Ovalle describes his installation as “a public service project” that provides visitors with a luxury health spa experience for free. It also resurrects certain vital questions, central to Minimalism, about the “white cube” of the gallery space and its relation to a host of other sterile and/or sacred environments.

After showering in a private alcove, you slip into the tank, which has been partially filled with saltwater heated to body temperature. The beauty of this darkened, womb-like environment slowly unfolds as the 90-minute float-time progresses (not coincidentally, the same amount of time it takes to watch an average-length movie). You may float peacefully, grateful for the rare opportunity to get away from it all; you may have mild visual or auditory hallucinations; you might feel fearful, fidgety or simply bored.

The cumulative effect of all this is the realization of just how little time we devote to the practice of solitude (and it is indeed something that must be practiced). Well worth the time and effort it demands, “The El Nin~o Effect” provides a surprisingly moving, even emotionally overwhelming experience, which encourages us to rethink the nature of physical confinement alongside the virtually limitless expanse of the human mind.

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* Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 587-3373, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays. Appointments must be made in pairs at least 24 hours in advance.