We just saw Clough Hanson Gallery's current offering, "In Search Of...". Curators Dustin Dennis, Amanda Lechner, and Christopher Ulivo say they've enlisted artists who "are not interested in finite possibilities, but instead look to the strange, fictional, and unknown to emerge with material that posits new scenarios, alternate conclusions, and yet more questions." In that spirit, here are nine texts on the exhibition:
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Detail from Leah Beeferman′s
1201.2280v1,2012, Laser etched Plexiglas, Formica tabletops, and sound. Dimensions variable. |
1. Everywhere you look there are lovely little abstractions that fill (or create) gaps in language or understanding, tiny reminders of the limits of particular kinds of knowledge. Two of them occupy TV screens in Amanda Lechner's painting, Gaiter Pratt Delegates. Some, like the ones in Jackie Hoving's Vision and David Humphrey's Distracted Predators, wash over human or animal forms, as if to underscore the absurd mystery of our own bodies. Leah Beeferman wades deepest into abstraction, mining dry scientific data and turning it into color, form, and sound. It's a great way to talk about uncertainty and the creation of new forms of knowledge.
2. 's proximity to Mike Peter Smith's Untitled (Cyclops) throws this into relief. Harmon's cave is a mysterious void framed by a fecund mass. It hovers somewhere in-between real and imagined space, artifice and nature. It invites contemplation but resists knowledge. Smith's skull, however, is immanently knowable. The skull's interior void has been filled by a tiny model of a blacksmith's shop. It's a skull with a tiny model of a blacksmith's shop inside. It's a skull with a tiny model of a blacksmith's shop inside. Harmon leverages the ability of a constructed image to point to something beyond what it depicts, seducing us into making something out of our experience with it. Smith's sculpture succumbs to its thing-ness - it is what it is and it is that because an artist made it that way. This is not to throw shade on the sculpture (taken on it's own merits, we actually quite like it) but to say that there are artists here who are interested in open-endedness and questions, and there are artists here who are interested in weird shit, and they don't always overlap like we're told they do.
On our way out we picked up a lengthy essay on the exhibition by Stephen Tateshi. It begins by juxtaposing a passage from Hegel with the opening lines of the TV show that the exhibition cribs it's name and interrogative spirit from, and then asks What does it mean to juxtapose...Hegel with the opening narration from "In Search Of"? which, just...we stopped reading. Later, while using the essay to make an origami dinosaur, we caught a glimpse of the phrase "a straining against the yoke of man's Absolute Knowledge" and felt assured that our response was squarely in line with the exhibition's thesis, even if not all of the art is.
3. In Search Of
(9+14) (19+5+1+18+3+8) (15+6)
23 (2+3) 54 (5+4) 21(2+1)
(5+9+3)
17 (1+7)
8
Those with the 8 Life Path are gifted with natural leadership and the capacity to accumulate great wealth. You have a great talent for management in all areas of life, especially in business and financial matters. You understand the material world; you intuitively know what makes virtually any enterprise work. Your talent lies not with the bookkeeping or petty management, but with greater vision, its purpose and its long-range goals. You are a visionary and a bit reckless at the same time. You posses the ability to inspire people to join you in your quest, but often they are incapable of seeing what you see. You attract financial success more than any other Life Path, but effort is required. So you'll make a lot of money off of this show. Congrats!
4. For a show that places so much importance on questions, the whole thing is strangely light on abstraction, that great human invention for probing the unknowable and unspeakable. In its place there are depictions. Unreal animals locked in violent embrace, unreal and real plants surrounding the mouth of a cave, a real person participating in an ESP experiment, other real people acting out vaguely historical fictions. We're given a lot of information couched in a lot of narratives, which leaves little room for invention and almost no room for
5. At the back of the show, the table that holds a small rock temple with a video and a photo also on it, which are rocks associated with Lucifer. We see under this chaos, four sawhorses holding up the table that got down on all fours, like the Muslims do when they pray to Allah, it is believed that Lucifer or the devil would assume a prostration position and the witches would line up and kiss his anus as a sign of respect. We not only saw a classic Lucifer Ritual Pose but we also saw the quick building of a pyramid shape with each sawhorse. The pyramid is Satan’s Pyramid and an occult seal used to invoke Satan during rituals.) In Freemason Bibles, which is basically the King James Bible, except on page 33 of the Freemason Bible, it informs the reader that Lucifer is the real God & that Lucifer is the real Jesus and also according to this Freemason Bible, it is indeed Lucifer that is the carrier of light. So, these people in this art show are masters at double talk and hiding their worship of Satan behind Christianity.
7. Corkey Sinks' geo-numerology charts and crystal lamps, Deb Sokolow's intensely wrought conspiracy theory drawings, and Elijah Burgher's sigils form a triangle in the gallery. Clearly the logic that guided their installation did not come from the same rational mind that typically hangs art 60 inches from center, a polite distance from it's neighbors, on clean white walls. Is this a space for ritual, a landing pad for some unknown being, a power triangle in which we can charge our chakras? Whatever it is, we also get the sense that for these artists, this is no formal exercise. The work doesn't describe the unknown, it pleads with it, espouses belief in it, worships it, needs it. The large painting at the center of this triangle is not on the gallery checklist. Attendants profess to have no knowledge it's origin, and the curators pretend to know nothing about it. It certainly can't be what it appears to be, but what if it were? What if we could reconsider this shakily wrought grid not as a work of minimalism or abstraction, but as a system of otherworldly knowledge? This imperfect pattern not as evidence of humanity but as evidence of the existence of...something else, beyond? The show, being about questions and the beyond, asks big questions and forces the viewer into the beyond, succeeding in concept, effect, and affect.
8. A great painting by David Humphrey seems to be about the exhibition rather than in it. It depicts a mass of paint swatches with distinctly human eyes, distracting a pair of cats (who might be caught in the process of becoming human) from their prey. It reads as a metaphor, and as such an answer or maybe even an antidote to the questions that the exhibitions purports to ask. Take the Humphrey with Jakie Hoving's Vision (another persony abstract mass with an emphasis on eyes) and Matt Bollinger's drawing, Doubled (which induces a feeling of altered states, making us question our facility as viewers), and you might start to suspect that there's a conspiracy at work here, a shadow show within the show. Don't trust your eyes, it seems to whisper from under a tin-foil hat. There is no authority here. Is it brilliant curating, or just a manifestation of our desire to find sense in a show that privileges open interrogation over rationality?
9. We might be projecting, but we felt that a kinky little fiction by Christoper Ulivo called "The Midnight Acquisition of Yellow Falls" injects some much-needed queerness into the show (because, really - if anyone is questioning received knowledge and operating beyond the limits of the norm, it's the queers - am I right, Marys? etc). But overall, it's pretty tame. Satan doesn't make a single appearance, and neither do magick, reptoids, conspiracy theories, or Scientology (or much of any kind of religion - a big oversight). Where are the outsider artists who make spiritual conduits simply because they have to connect to something? Where are the conspiracy theorists who write screed after screed for their very lives? The darker or less well-trod aspects of the unknown are left untouched in favor of a frothy, child-friendly surface treatment of the tropes of nuttiness that we suppose matches the tone and subject matter of the TV show the exhibition is based on. We're left with the sense that few people here actually believe in anything non-normative, but rather enjoy thinking about (making art about) these things with a cool detachment. Look how weird I am! they exclaim. But the real weirdos don't tell you how weird they are, because the real weirdos don't think they're weird at all. This is not to say that there isn't plenty to ponder here. All in all, the show is pretty good, it could just use a few real weirdos.
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