By Emily Gillispie
Daily Cougar Staff

Talking heads smashed under couches and chairs and life-like eyeballs dangling from the ceiling aren't what you might expect from a museum art exhibit. Introjection: Tony Oursler, 1976-1999, held at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Montrose gives you these oddities among a few other surprises.

The semi-revolutionary Introjection, which literally means to incorporate ideas into one's personality unconsciously, through the use of video, computer and canvas, reveals the haunting aspects of dissociative identity disorder, once called multiple personality disorder, as well as the impact of TV and film on life.

The exhibit features more than 80 works of New York-based Oursler. The exhibition tour is the first to display the artist's work in the video medium. To display this selection, the upper level of the CAM is transformed into a virtual psychotic episode of whispering voices and talking sculptures. Walking through the exhibit, don't be shocked if you start feeling a little mad.

The first work you will notice in the dimly lit and noise-polluted museum will be "Judy," a series of talking head sculptures that occupy a whole wall. Each body in the piece seems to represent an alternate personality of Judy, a fictional sufferer of DID. At first glance, the first alter, played by frequent collaborator Tracy Leipoid, appears to be a lifeless doll on a stick, but terrified shrieks quickly reveal the projected life-like talking image on the doll's face. 

The piece continues as we meet a crude and cursing figure under a couch, a face on flowers and a nude and scared woman reflected on a dress. "Judy" is unique in that it incorporates the peaceful image of flowers with a harsh disorder like DID.

In continuance of this uniqueness, Oursler's "Kepone Drum" comments on the world's chemical imbalance with a steel drum projecting an image onto a glob on the floor. 

Most of Oursler's images appear serious, but there is some humor to be found among the dementia. "MMPI Red" is a tiny red doll with his head crushed under a red folding chair. "Most people get what they deserve!" the image shouts among other unrelated sentences. Here, Oursler claims that DID is equivalent to channel surfing, ever changing and unrelated.

Stop to look at "MMPI Red" and you'll likely see four large eyeballs dangling from the ceiling. "Glimmer" appears to be blinking brown eyes watching you, but in fact at a closer glance, the eyes reflect an image of the popular movie Three Faces of Eve, which is about DID. This is to reveal Oursler's belief that TV and film invades our minds.

Perhaps the most intriguing and confusing is "Side Effects," which displays five heads of varying sizes talking to themselves. Eyeballs wander and faces squirm as each head depicts what Oursler describes as the interior state of chemical imbalance. These amazingly realistic faces are hard to look at and especially hard to listen to. Their words are indistinguishable and trying to decipher them leads to annoyance.

"Underwater" is just another of Oursler's creepy pieces. It's a head in a box, apparently black and blue from lack of air. The inconspicuous projector shines a vision of distress while the audience hears the groans of death.

The largest of the works is "Optics," presented as a huge projected image of an angel and devil wrestling. This one is hard to analyze. The black and white movie on one wall and a sunspot on the opposite make it difficult to understand the point of the artist. The camera obscura only adds to the confusion. The viewer doesn't know where to begin and may even have to ask what exactly he or she is looking at.

"L7-L5-84," however, fits in nicely with the theme of television and film compulsion. In a small, dark backroom of the museum, this section holds a box with a peephole that the viewer can look through and see two young children playing with Star Wars toys. This study in how kids act out roles they see in movies is an interesting twist on the role of movies in real life.

Not only is Introjection aurally invasive, it is also visually distracting. The exhibit is cluttered at times, with too many images to digest at once. Strange voices, dim lights and talking sculptures at every turn often make for a sense of paranoia. But this is essential to Oursler's works. 

The sounds and images invade, as do his themes of multiple personalities and an intruding television industry. The exhibit is worth seeing, not by the light-hearted or small children by any means, but for the mature someone who seeks out diversity in art and in life. 

Introjection: Tony Oursler, 1976-1999 runs Tuesday-Sunday through Feb. 13 at the Contemporary Arts Museum.