Lauren Kalman – Dress Up Dress Down

Received in direct email. Ms. Kalman’s webpage can be found here: http://www.laurenkalman.com.

     The imaged body iconizes the human form. The imaged body denies physicality; it is complete, a continuous surface, and an infallible skin. It preaches the virtues of visually perceptible self-perfection. Imaged bodies are idols to model the self.

          But the physical body is both transgressive and can be transgressed. It spills, tears, infects, expands and contracts through the skin. Our subconscious self can also penetrate the controlled façade. In spite of our conscious desire to emulate iconic ideals our personality quarks, flaws, and social deviations twitch their way to visibility.

 

         As a model for the physical body the image is deceptive. Imaged bodies are designed, manipulated and static, qualities that the living human form resists. Attempts to emulated images are often futile. We rarely achieve the perfect body, balance socially inscribed gender rolls with capitalistic career goals, or obtain the advertised promise of unadulterated happiness.

 

         Dress Up Dress Down is an installation of videos, objects, and audio that investigates the transgression of the physical body despite attempts to mold it. The videos in the installation progress through a series of physical activities with no recognizable purpose or resolution. Through out the piece a female figure is dressed in either in a white dress or suit. These costumes serve as multiple personalities, each attempting to achieve a goal that is gender specific. The actions begin as absurd even playful. As the piece progresses these gender divides break down, as does the white facade of clothing, skin is revealed, fluids are spilled, and gender is blurred. There is a final attempt to control the transgression of the body, but the result is erasure of the individual and inevitably the demise of the self.

 

         This progression is loosely modeled off of the alchemic goal of ultimate material and spiritual purity, with the intermediate phases of a hermaphroditic state and of mortification, the destruction of the element in order to be reborn. This is mirrored in a color shift in the work from white, to red (rust) and white, to red.

 

         The objects in the work follow the videos through state changes and reflect medical processes of research, diagnosis, and prescription. They begin as skeletal specimens of study, desire, and mimicry, which also foreshadow bodily destruction. Biological samples jars and microscopes, and then medicine bottles and the iconic mortar and pestle follow the specimens. The final group of objects are a set of mortuary tables in the shadows of the most remote space, present, but not announced.

 

         Set aside from the rest of the space is a room with two speakers. They emanate the rhythmic pounding of springs with an intermittent twang as they shift. The table with the speakers is illuminated in the dark room. The audio is ambiguous in its origin and has the uncomfortable tendency to sound like bedsprings. It is not until the viewer turns to leave the space that they might recognize a small trampoline in a dark corner. The action represented in the audio, as throughout the installation, is perpetual, with dark undertones, and with an ambiguity that is never entirely resolved.

Foxy Productions – Year of the Pig Sty

This one is a little oldie – found it floating around in my archives – but man is it a goody. Let me just quickly touch upon my favorite combination of points from this selection:

• Degree of logic inversely proportional to time spent considering the work.
• Manner in which parts relate: really obvious… or… really confusing?
• Sandals

Now, to be perfectly honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of trash art; accordingly, I didn’t go see this piece. It never got its fair chance to make its case in person: for all I know it was a juggernaut of emotional energy delicately constructed out of a studio full of useless shit. Bruce Nauman did it, didn’t he?

Foxy Production presents Year of The Pig Sty, Hany Armanious’ inaugural New York exhibition.

In Armanious’ provocative work, perverse actions take place upon unexpected materials, resulting in enigmatic objects, scenes and associations. Like a pranksterish alchemist, he transforms the process of casting into a witty and symbolic practice. His detours and digressions through the fictional systems he constructs, paradoxically foster both confusion and engagement.

Year of The Pig Sty is an installation with an internal logic that seems more elusive the longer the work is contemplated. The viewer is greeted with a shocking vista of filth and disarray: on closer inspection, the work resembles a wayward workshop, where strange organic objects are crafted from mud. A desperate struggle seems to have taken place to keep an outmoded artisanal practice going.

The installation is a site where intense and delirious actions have taken place, where motives remain mysterious, and odd linguistic connections are forged. Recalling Beuys’ interplays between textures and history, Year of The Pig Sty inventively interweaves materials and allegory; but unlike Beuys’ work, the associations here are inconclusive, provisional, and likely to be misleading.

How various parts of the installation relate to one another can be alternately elementary or elusive. Crocs, the lightweight therapeutic footwear made through injection casting, figure centrally in the work: in one area, a chaotic collection of Crocs, shoe molds, molded bacon, shoeboxes, socks, among other elements, poetically and humorously conflates therapy, consumerism, and failure. An oversized Styrofoam box, hand-carved and containing mud and oversized truffles made from soil and resin, is surrounded by muddy Croc footprints. A trough constructed from form-ply is filled with mud, as if waiting for pigs to return. Resembling an alien pod, a white Styrofoam box is fused with the sole of a Birkenstock and cast in resin. A doormat with hollows is used to mold circular bricks through the action of the muddy Crocs being wiped on it. The bricks are dried under a snooker table light with hydroponic grow lamps that resembles a descending spacecraft. The same bricks are braced together to form pottery pool cues; apparently the end-product of this wayward production line.

The installation represents perhaps an artist’s studio in throes of fervid activity. Messy, unformed, embryonic objects are in the process of objecthood, as if we are witnesses to the primal scene of creativity. Or has the habitat of the artist been terminally disturbed, the scene contaminated, the project abandoned?

Branch Gallery, Durham North Carolina – Body Politic

I thought I’d begin the show with some nice, wholesome Southern art-speak from North Carolina. I received this via the Re-Title mailing list. The show is taking place in Durham, NC at The Branch Gallery through Dec. 22.

With their hidden text messages and muted palette, Casey Cook’s paintings invite the viewer on a coded journey that is playful and mysterious. A sophisticated use of space and line draws in the viewer, meshing elements of trompe l’oeil, reiterated geometric forms, and organic abstractions to confuse notions of space. Her depiction of the body is fragmented and sexual- male and female intertwine in hedonistic camouflaged repetition. For this exhibition, Cook will create a site-specific wall drawing. Cook, who is based in Carrboro, North Carolina, received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1997. She has had solo exhibitions at venues such as Lehmann Maupin, NY and Richard Heller Gallery, CA, and has participated in group exhibitions at venues including Deitch Projects, NY; Pat Hearn Gallery, NY; and Matthew Marks Gallery, NY.

…

Also based in New York, Shinque Smith’s dynamic bales and bundles have a textual quality which underscores their anthropomorphic structures. Using discarded, personal, and found items of clothing as her primary resource, Smith’s works transform unwanted and used objects into entropic sculptural forms. In doing so, her works explore the history of commodity exchange, globalism, and poverty. As Smith uses color, texture, and form to blur the line between abstraction and figuration, she disturbs the separation between the body and its trappings, or the consumer and the consumed. Smith received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2003. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions at venues including Cuchifritos, NY; The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO; Scuola dell’Arte dei Tiraoro e Battioro, Venice, Italy; Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis, MN; and PS1, NY.