Rust, soil, tetanus, trash, industrial farming, blight, and sunsets. Everything vast, dead and wasting away; everything enshrined in thick paint and glowing orange. Drippy romanticism. I can't help but think of this, and how these seem like that, lite. A clever shoe.
Who are these people? Look at how they’ve aged!
These photos are mostly the same: the same two (similar-looking) people posed in identical pairs, under identical lighting, wearing the same shirts. Every prop and costume is white or clear. So much careful reconstruction and restraint exercised over so much time — 14 years! — that the differences become charged. The aging, but also the choices. In one, they’re shiny (sweaty?). In another they’re laughing. In others they’re in hockey masks or hair nets. In the last, they’re caked in white. Why?
Yo dawg, I heard you like paint. Both as a historical means of representation and also as a pure material with its own implicit aesthetics. Additionally, it has come to my attention that you enjoy vernacular photography. So I put some photos in your paint and some paint in your photos, so that you can contemplate figure/ground, medium/message, and presentation/representation relationships while you look at these paintings of photos (of paint on photos).
First impression: maybe this kind of thing has been done before?
But! The big blobs, in addition to being something of an intellectual hall of mirrors, are also flowers blooming out of a girl’s obscured face. And wadded-up chewing gum, and vandalism, and a sea breeze. They transform within the photographs’ contexts, and act within them; these pictures work your gut as well as your brain. They speak of hot days, suburban vacations, beauty, adolescence, banality, and the smell of spring.
The colors are pretty and smart. They’re caricatures—exaggerated echoes—the difference between what we think and what we see. The grass, greener; the flesh too pink. The sea falsely sea foam green.
Up close the layers collapse; all there is is a single, thin, and uniform layer of merely actual oils.
The pristine, formal, structured, and bizarre Rococo aesthetics of 18th century European high art filtered through an emphatically naive (almost punk?) American vernacular: (some pretty terrible?) thrift store paintings and out-of-focus polaroids.
Unspeakable horrors have been perpetrated upon these mattresses. Presumably they’ve been marinated at high heat in some froth of cigarette mud, latex vomit, and urine bile, before being left out in the rain and sun to, like, ferment.
Old men and cats.
Phillip Guston?
They don’t smell?
Gross as it is, the show is also delicate, maybe graceful. The mattresses were simply stretched like canvases, dipped in shiny pink latex, and brought into the gallery... left to tell their own stories. And the hair drawings do so much with so little! Precise and visceral, because it’s hair. Laid out in elegant arcs and coated in rubbery flesh.
