Cyber art. Kind of as hokey as that sounds.
My favorite thing about about these, as a group, is how they — even a few of the paintings — work across scales in this awkward, garish, uniquely digital way? Tack-sharp micro-level precision wielded with merely human levels of attention. I guess that’s what they call the uncanny valley.
The fish-eyed bear is wonderful.
Curt and brutal. Which is a strange thing to say about an exhibition which half-consists of rainbow-colored pigment-popsicles, but they’re melting! Slowly and inexorably. When I am there they are still substantial but in ruins, strewn across the podiums and floors. The resulting streams of flowing marks are beautiful.
But the other room! Pairs. Black rug-moons. Cold, dead, flat, and plastic; astroturf rocks cut into clean circles and slathered in a half-inch of Vaseline. Perched throughout are identical squares of glass that are sharper for having been turned 45 degrees, housing single band-aids — there are gleeful whispers that the artist refers to them as “pussies.” And then there are the galvanized twenty-gallon tubs of soap. The smell is abrasive, fluorescent. Being in the room feels like bathing in bleach and gives me a headache. Cascade and Tide made absurd and maybe dangerous by simple accumulation.
“Soap,” the room says, “SOAP,” while punching you in the face, “ALSO PUSSIES.”
I missed a performance, which was probably intense. Strong but coy — a fascinating tension between quiet and loud. Loud is the wrong word—it’s all very quiet—but these bodies are doing extraordinary things in stillness: holding poses, defying gravity, arcing, folding, and inverting. Static gymnastics; a strange, sometimes brightly-colored exhibitionism in empty, perfect, or mundane spaces.
The subjects seem introverted, achieving these things for and within themselves. All turned away, rarely much of a face. If there’s an outward-facing affect here it’s stiff and awkward.
The show feels cold?
A theme of famous architecture, which makes me go, oh yeah, “building,” it has two meanings. Which, okay. Is it about ideal forms? It’s definitley about bodies interacting with spaces built for bodies, in ways that the creators of the spaces did not intend.
The videos feel like an inversion of this premise: the Malibu modernist architecture imposing itself upon the thick, sculpted body, which is weird and on display: something something gender, and our deadening, futile culture of surfaces. Maybe a pot shot at Los Angeles.
Strangely spartan. Just a few images, repeated. One thrice: on giant NFS vinyl, small $300 aluminum, and commodified on an iPad. What does it mean?
Beautiful. Fraught? Communities of hippies and the deeply religious made out to be capital-O Other; more animal than human. Stoic, pure, suspicious, raw. Skittish and dirty; sad and prone to conspiracy theories. Heroically lonely, quietly insane, profoundly strange. Zero smiles: it’s all vacant stares, hollow and without shame. I’m troubled to be in such a clean intellectual building sipping wine with clean intellectual people, staring back at these apparent beasts1 from a safe distance, crafting assumptions. I have a friend who lives in the woods; she’s super joyful and relatable about it?
This show has one foot in steampunk Victorian carnival barker tropes, but the other in something far stranger and more deeply felt — an attitude toward death and destruction that is serene, and terrifying, and far more terrifying for being so serene. Flowers, blooming. Huck Finn and the swamp thing. Monsters in crude suits of wool and twigs. Wagon wheels and voodoo masks. Everything immaculately posed, either with the clenched stillness of a daguerreotype, or frozen in midair, just so. Next to the technical perfection of the photos, the drawings, posters, and sculptures are too crude, or perhaps not crude enough? But it has been a long time since anything has lead my eye around as effectively as the large photos and panoramas; I start dissecting their triangles and circles, their echoes and loops.
Anecdotally: “fledermaüs!” It’s a great word!
Also on view: belts for angry punk giants, northern renaissance fleshy muppet cysts, the deep irony of manufactured pop, and some old National Geographics.
