The fish’s marks are light, layered, open and airy; nicely fluid, if you will. The leaves and the faces are deeply nostalgic, conjuring autumn and the 70s. The faces are maybe awkwardly naïve, blunt, over-serious? They remind me of art from the WPA, or, weirdly, church.
The best bit is the interplay between the canvases and the painted walls: the former anchoring, the latter buoying, providing counterpoint and facilitating flow.
The opening felt like a big deal. A big name — The Biennial of the Americas — a big, beautiful space, and a packed house full of hip- and/or important-seeming people.
The work is big too. Multiples are everywhere.
A lot about Mexico, and a lot of criticism of US capitalism, industry, and marketing — giant systems overwhelming people.1
There are crisp, monumental portraits which seem to say that the only honest face is a disquieted one. There are immigrants’ longings for identity and community written in the lights of roadside America or in ink on their faces. There are traditional crafts juxtaposed with heavy industry or made into gross sausage-flesh… there are tremendously fun-looking beach-ball catapults being operated with such robotic ritual that they become sad metaphors for dehumanization and conflict. There are plastic-y, perfect, mass-produced products made insidious or banal.
Teresa Anderson encases herself in a very uncomfortable suit.
Then there’s this whole other strand, one of beauty and an awareness of nature, light, and the (gorgeous, raw) architecture of the space itself. Clouds, wind, windows, and light fixed in vinyl and oils. Puffy albino amoeba floating out of the windows. Nine thousand shimmering threads.
The show is supposed to be about drafts but whatever the work, it was certainly not rough. Clean, clever, minimal and sometimes obtuse… political… serious about its joy and dry with its barbs. There’s a mold I have in my head for what a giant, museum-caliber contemporary art show looks and feels like and this giant, important thing fit snugly within it.
Perfect bodies chopped and layered, like onions or IDM.
The hollow, doll-like sexuality of fashion magazines. Flat, solid pastels; delicately rendered renaissance anatomy. The show is stylishly soulless and objectifies its subjects: plastic, bloodless bodies with no people inside. Most of the heads have been cropped just below the eyes but a few of the faces have been actively scratched out. Is objectification — the premise that people and bodies can be separated, and that there’s something to be gained by dealing with bodies separately — less troubling if it’s not erotic? If it’s cold, rather than hot?
Classic like Greek busts, without color or appendages.
I wrote “bloodless,” but there are actually leeches on the most intense piece in the room, which is black, shiny, and reminiscent of a clown. In other words: evil.