Jessica Warboys

Village Gate
Noah Klink Gallery
17.11.2021 – 15.01.2022

Meta-poetic/literal encounters with signs and fields frame the journey 

Image + word = sense and poetics. Jessica Warboys is not afraid to be literal, declarative. Her pigments, river, video, nouns, sculpture are framed by the show announcement’s list – “Alibi, Part, Split, Woven, Gate Earth, River, Body”... It fractures and opens meanings to bond, re-bond with the natural world and its inevitable structuring, which is always re-structuring, (becoming). The visual entry’s green gate of sequenced canvases is ornamental, proppish –where does this green gate go? To the other side of the gallery, into a room-surround 10m long by 2m high canvas impregnated with mineral pigments and let flow in a Norwegian River. If art always invokes architecture and its classes, this submerges it. Without knowing RIVER, it could be discounted as haphazard, aberrant. Mirror nerves trigger perceptual and muscle memory; blurred patterns become centrifugal and pull the body. Sparsely tattooed against its motion are buoys of totemic ‘endless’ columns and canoe forms. These swiftly repeat in a video in an adjacent room, along with the associative words. And then, a slow pan of a long-nosed mask that is also a chair, anchors outside the flow. This furniture/sculpture straddles fugue and stasis, elephantine. Nourishment and vitality of water bathe between 2 and 3-D, connectively, propriaceptively, as through a long trunk and down the spine. Another river sample is across from it, a muddy English one with a green canvas window that holds snake-like forms which undulate and dissolve on the left then resolve on the right –the intimacy of covering one’s body, before and after immersion.

Sandra Mujinga
Preis der Nationalgalerie 2021
Hamburger Banhof
16.09.2021 to 27.02.2022

Warboys’ scatter aesthetics and wetness are echoed in matters of post-colonialism and race by Sandra Mujinga, the National Prizewinner at the Hamburger Banhof. Here the viewer meets Reworlding Remains –dark, cargo-cultish giants made of woven fabric in a room of deep aquarium-green light. A guard encourages us to snap a photo with them, tourist style. Other tourist destinations are grounded in the physical, durational presence of a long-take video on an idyllic and rocky rough shore, hypnotically washed by waves and intercut with black, male, water-beaded skin. Water wears down the rocks through millennia; the man cups his hands around a glow like an inner volcano against erosion. Tropical sonics in the adjacent spaces relax, but hold no birds. A pink mist of fluoro-luminescence assimilates us into the room and its projections of festive and meditative carnival scenes obliterate tourism like reverse-engineering, somatically.

This review originally appeared in Rain Taxi Review of Books, July 10, 2020

SAŠA ASENTIĆ & COLLABORATORS
co-directed by Alexandre Achour
TANZ IN DER DDR: WAS BLEIBT?

(Dance in the German Democratic Republic – What Remains?)

Nov 9, 2019
Das Ost-West-Ding Festival (The East-West-Thing Festival)
Sophiensaele, Berlin

First published in Hair and Nails Magazine #19, Dec. 2019

If the body under Communism was one of generation –mass productivity and its surveilled enforcement, then the body under Capitalism is one of consumption –the individual engulfed by technologic indulgence. In Saša Asentić’s “Dance in the DDR- What Remains?” the resilience of the former East is a lesson to the de-politicizing dopamine clickbait of the now West. Going to see it on the night of the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Wall, the feeling of being held between states was powerful. A friend stayed away as the title conjured folk dance and propaganda. However, the reality was more angsty, expressionist, and futuristic. One piece declared that “the body that is mangled is more resilient”, an attitude that has precarious resonance.

Berit Jentzsch’s shadow dance of Love started the evening with her hands making two swans that turned into a single bird straining at flight. Rooted in the Ausdrucktanz tradition[1] from Dore Hoyer’s “Afectos Humanos” (1962), it was simple, elegant, and something virtually censor-proof in DDR times. Then Mr. Asentić introduced Arila Siegert’s polarized response to it; “Kentauren”, from 1989, and extended the shadow play to include vanity, greed, and other vices that reflected both the GDR and current dance industrial complex. This presentational form, the theatrical essay, was typical to the East, but to Asentić’s credit, he let its affective qualities lead the way. [2]

After “Love”, Mses. Jentzsch and Rike Flämig criticized one another’s careers and lack of talent to the point of objectifying themselves as consumer goods. Part of Jo Fabian’s “Whisky and Flags”, 1993, this East/West dialectic includes downing shots and an explosively contorted solo. Fabian practices socio-physical synesthesia with his work to examine and problematize reunification’s transitions between theater and culture, language, movement, and form. There is no one-to-one translation for this spirit’s impulse, but in “Whisky and Flags” – the East German communist future has become a thing of the past, whereas the Second World War Nazi past and bourgeois German period before the war approaches us in a decontextualized and re-contextualized condition from the direction where we had expected to meet the future”.[3] Saša Asentić reiterated the author’s premise that it be re-staged every ten years to check in on the state of the reunion.

The next piece, it was announced, would be a “female performer with a shaved head, surrounded by sound” and would appear “where no one expected her, but many awaited her”. Fine Kwiatkowski was a pale white avatar of careful movements that merged from self-protective to slightly frenetic. Her arms were wings, then shields in layers of video-projected parallel lines that filled the Sophiensaele. These defined her latitude, emergences, and disappearances between, over, and under shadow walls. The linear-scan technology blurred with border crossing footage, then the audience was asked to stand, walk, then stop. She danced among our bodies, which were half shadow forest, half city to her fugitive hunches towards klieg lights at tunnel ends. Immersive, obliterative, we stood for what the crowd is to the individual –blocking or providing clear paths and escape routes.

Out of these densities and into a clearing was a piece originally made by Patricio Bunster, a Chilean exile to Dresden after the Allende coup d’état in 1973. Daniela Marini, Alexandre Achour, and Saša Asentić asked, in various languages, that whomever wanted to know his/her story come to them. Eventually the entire audience of 120 or so, sat around the three performers. In my group, Ms. Marini (who is Chilean) asked us to tell her what we felt and imagined about Freedom while she sang a song in Spanish that mentioned a mariposa (butterfly). A German behind me replied that he was irritated by the question, implying that audience participation is a cop-out to entertainment. Fair enough. I replied that her song reminded me of the absurdity of human flight. Like Da Vinci’s machines the temporary levitation of dance is the prisoner’s impossible escape, and the cliché of a butterfly going over the Wall accentuated it. Then she said that in order to be really free, and for the dance to continue, she needed us to take off her clothes. I thought of turning to the guy behind me and saying, “still irritated?” She lay there for a while, naked, then moved between all groups, singing and crying with her mouth directly on our bodies. In this immersion it was not a question of the dance’s dramatic background as much as the performer’s angst and uncertainty: as if she could not understand her own question. Trained in Chile by German dancers from Kurt Jooss’s company, Bunster’s aim was to merge a local vocabulary with globalized movements and restructure the nationality of their forms.

After these two full-on engagements, a simple keyboard was brought out with three stuffed pigeons and two paper dolls. Dennis Seidel, a theatre maker and performer with learning disabilities, quirkily, tenderly, and insistently did a puppet show, played the keyboard, and sang a song. It was about the dancer and communist choreographer Jean Weidt. It recounts the moment during the Soviet Era when he was betrayed by colleagues, devalued by the State, and forced to leave his teaching position for a lesser role. Devastated, he meets a friend on a park bench who holds him…

The evening closed with the re-enactment of part of Marianne Vogelsang’s “Five Preludes”. Its blocky black costume and gliding motions evoked a cloisonné Oskar Schlemmer. Mash-up’ed with Bach and “Red Poppy Song”[4], it both passed on her tradition and was a symbolic elegy to the classicist and expressionist remains of the DDR.

The discussion panel afterwards was at a long communal table full of snacks and drinks and I looked forward to hearing about the processes and revelations that the cast underwent. The moderator, Jens Richard Giersdorf ,[5] and I wore the same grey striped sweaters, sat on the same bench, and shared a laugh about maintaining symmetry. Mostly what was discussed, however, were the logistics of the collaborations and reconstructions. It made me happy to know that there had been such engagement with the project, but I was hoping to hear about re-envisioning the pieces in contemporary contexts.

Training back to the Bornholmer S-Bahn station, it was midnight and the Ossis and Wessis who first crossed thirty years ago had taken over the bridge. There was a pot-bellied stove with hot Glühweine, Sekt, and beer. A portable sound system played bands such as Zahlt (Pay!) and tunes like “I Don’t Know How to Tango”. This was an un-advertised, Hasselhoff-free celebration, and the police seemed to be there in sympathy to keep traffic from interfering. As the crowd swayed to Punk and genre-fluid Sprechstimme[6], Socialist austerity and Capitalist excess fused. Like “Dance in the DDR -­what Remains?”, it was good to see the past in action, spilling out of its designated party zones with gratitude and tribute.

[1] Expressionist dance, a direct reaction against ballet, influenced by the individual’s claims to create and present their own choreographic works.

[2] Author’s note, no timeline or background notes were given in the written program, some of the history has been re-constructed by dialoguing with Mr. Asentić and other research.

[3] Tomaž Toporišič , The Essay on Stage: Singularity and Performativity, Slovenian Society for Comparative Literature, 2010

[4] The Red Poppy is regarded as the first Soviet ballet with a modern, revolutionary theme. Lyrics include: “As red as a red poppy, So red does the inner rose bloom in my mind, Such is the inner flower in me, I had been a good hero who wanted to offer many a new life”.

[5] Author of “The Body of the People: East German Dance since 1945”, University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

[6] “Speak-sing”

Until Our Hearts Stop
Meg Stuart
HAU, Berlin
April 24, 2019

Dance theater is similar to opera, its conceits can be ridiculously dramatic, but also express the behavioral modifications needed to extend life’s possibilities. In it there is much that is neither dance nor theater, but a subtlety that is in the heart of the beholder and in the best case a series of uncomfortably emotional states that ring hard, true, soaring. Its subtleties are also in the pocket of the beholder, in the dirtiest, most intimate sense.

Meg Stuart’s long-touring show “Until Our Hearts Stop” does not drop its invention to intention ratio for its 2+ hours. It magnetizes by its sheer over-the-top cultural condensing, deconstruction, self-deprecating dénouement, and free whiskey passed out by the actors about halfway in.

In Berlin, where art seems to live and die by research and thesis, Stuart’s work serves as a meta-relief. The grounding of “Until Our Hearts Stop Beating” is duration, variation, and reconfiguration —more or less everything that it is possible to do with the human body. Doughy, membranous pretzel mountains are formed and torn asunder by the nine players on stage as a group, in pairs, etc., until three emerge as a real band, clothes come off others, and asses are played like instruments. Angst, aggression, affection, and blind repetition follow as the six remaining performers cycle through groupings and scenarios. It climaxes with two naked women hijacking the band and screaming out a Punk performance, then an exhausted aftermath of rebuilding.

The audience must also recover, and the forth wall becomes a drive-through window. Orders are taken from the stage for booze, fruit, and snacks. Clichés and devices gain momentum as we loosen up and settle into a long diatribe by a magician dishing to his confidant/mother about the theater world (aka Life). The disappearing of an audience member in a mirrored box becomes a layer of the self as it dissolves into gossip, self-doubt, lashing out, and weariness. Finally, the monolog ends, the energy flattens, and then reverses, with a question from one of the beautiful actors, “Will someone come home me tonight?” Hands go up, then the question is elaborated, “To unplug my toilet? It’s been running for three days”. This ante is scaled and rescaled as the audience is directly challenged to give the actors all their drugs and money for a night we’ll never forget, then an appeal to the millionaires present, if any, promising to end up via caravan in Russia and capture the last wild wolf. From the ecstatic applause and looks, I think that this does indeed happen after each show, which is why it is both the never-ending tour, and what the heart does at any given second, pushing us to its limits.

Berlin Top 10, 2018

Berlin Top Ten, 2018
-Sean Smuda
this first appeared in Hair and Nails #16
photo: see #11

 #1
Meg Stuart (read the show review in Hair and Nails #13)
The week after I saw that performance, I took Movement Research with Jan Burkhardt at Tanzfabrik. It was amazing as he narrated, guided, prodded and pushed us through BMC, CI, Yoga, and other movements that define the body, brain, and spirit. Afterwards I thanked him and told him how excited I was about dance here and Stuart’s piece. He replied that his partner was in it and suggested that I send the review to the company. I did and they liked it! Since he splits teaching with her, Sigal, Life into Art into Life has manifested full circle. She said my dancing was beautiful, now I can die.

#2
Hello World
Hamburger Banhof Museum
28.04 - 26.08, 2018
This was exactly what I needed while I was in the Saas-Fee Institute this July. The Banhof’s reckoning with colonial and political attitudes in its collection provided deep background against the SFI’s hyper-narrative of “Art and Poetic Praxis in Cognitive Capitalism”. In the back of the H.B.’s vast Agora was an old-school Duane Hanson, “Policeman and Rioter” (1967). Prescient of the Eighties’ CIA-engineered Crack wars, the sculpture’s Black protestor being beaten by a Black cop was a universally depressing un-mixed-metaphor of all violence being against one’s own. The work was an exclamation point to Alfredo Jaar’s neon of refugee migratory patterns and Siah Armjani’s two-story precarity housing. Despite having thirty students from all over the planet, the SFI rarely talked politics, which we groused about as Brazil’s elections ground to a head. In the Banhoff, art, theory, and politics intermingled: recordings of Benjamin Britten playing Gamelan on piano, Artaud on the inseparability of Art and Life, and the paintings of I. Made Budi. One of his works wielded the dense patterns of Indonesian tradition and had the jungle swallow a Dutch war plane in 1946 as Puputan (suicidal honor war) was fought against them. This fed directly into a close-reading of a Margaret Mead text on Bali lead by Tino Sehgal at the SFI. Our discussion of tradition and expression called to mind the Dakota and Sam Durant’s Scaffold. At what point(s) do we honor and break with tradition? This was answered in a later SFI lecture in which philosopher Yuk Hui spoke on Heidegger’s “End of Philosophy” and its giving way to Techné (making) as a living global philosophy.

#3
Shout out to Hannah Black’s show Eden Eden, 26.01.18 - 02.02.19, at Isabella Bortolozzi’s Aeter project space. Best party of last year, with Black’s work energizing from the basement up in a pagan-soap-opera-shrine-way (minus points for a zero-bass sound system).

 #4
Doro Aaltenberg (the Warhol of Schöneberg)’s sweet little collection (full disclosure – which I helped hang). It features Rosemarie Tröckel and the wryly multi-pronged Jürgens Stollhans. His work comically mashes new and old such as: a rocket car in a coliseum, a flaming paper Polish tank, and a glow-in-the-dark ghost. Jürgen’s concepted and mortared laughs explode frontiers of the ingrained.

#5
Had a non-stop sneezing reaction to Jörg Herold’s “Absolutes Numinosum” (an industrial/religious installation at Eigen+Art) and had to go sit by the window. There, I paged through more Neo Rauch catalogs than I knew existed and deepened my appreciation for the painter’s stage craft and mass-produced ideo-mythological Schmoos. I wistfully remembered seeing them in Berlin when there weren’t several zeros added to their then impressive $25K a pop. Finally, the Leipziger gallerist came up to me and said that they still talk.

 #6
Daniel Seiple’s “Making Waves” is a project that invites refugees to build a motor yacht from scratch. Berlin has more waterways to the kilometer than Amsterdam and this hits right at its heart. I visited the workshop of Syrian refugees working on the twenty-seven-foot boat and felt a bond as we talked about being displaced and learning German. They sell hand-crafted model replicas to advance its cause, such as the Italian WW2 dynamite-filled suicide speedboat with last-minute ejector seat. En garde Venice Biennale!

 #7
Wild, Wild, Country (Netflix documentary). There is a huge connection between Germany and Oregon, and it is about Free Love and sticking it to the Man. Suspiria-liciously, most of my family moved to Oregon years ago.

 #8
Stu Mead is a living treasure and has been in Berlin for over fifteen years, even though he sells better to the French! The artist’s sci-fi-50’s-porn-romance from a post-Catholic demented dimension is as prickly piquant as ever. Lookout for his solo show in NYC at the Fortnight Institute, March 28 – April 26, 2019.

#9
Lee Bul, Crash, November 13, 2018 - January 15, 2019 at Martin Gropius Bau dissipates a bit over its massive scale but has a crucial foundation. Growing up in an activist family that was consigned to continually relocate on the outskirts of Seoul by the government, she developed a sci-fi feminist strategy and had her first performances on sidewalks in alien costumes. ‘Nuff said!

 #10
Teufelsberg. The only Berliner that I knew before coming here ended up having his studio upstairs from mine. Sebastian Müllauer runs the Autonomous Systems Laboratory in the former American spy-station built on a 300-meter-deep pile of WW2 rubble, under which are the ruins of Hitler’s Weapons University. Ghost emails and exorcisms abound.

#11
Adéla Součková at the National Gallery in Prague for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. “I can hardly lift this thing it’s so damn heavy, and I can barely see out of this mask, let’s set it down again! Not here, the urine’s too much! This thing looks like a Chernobyl core. That homeless guy just saw us and crossed himself. I thought we weren’t including the church!” The first part of Adela’s performance score was for the performers and the public was not invited. One hundred fifty-five pounds of clay from the river Vitava was carried in the dark, through underpasses, to the Gallery. It lay on a human-sized stretcher and burdened four performers who didn’t know each other. We wore masks that signaled body organs, and in the end made it into a yurt where we sculpted sculptors sculpted.

 — Sean Smuda’s book Universal Capital is out now and available through Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin and Beyond Repair in the States.

Friends with Books

Hamburger Banhof, Berlin
October 19 – 21, 2018

Does the book have more potential for action and change than the internet? This is the subtext of Friends with Books at the Hamburger Banhof Museum in Berlin. Although billed as the largest and most important Art Book and Periodical Fair in Europe, the museum’s book store manager informs me that it is their branch in Cologne which buys and handles distribution. Berlin may be the HQ of art production, but apparently not its financial power. This does not deter the over two-hundred presenters and artists that are here.         

Normally spread out in the massive Agora hall, this year it is crowded into the wings to allow for Agnieszka Polska’s five-screen video, “The Demon’s Brain”. Thousands of books are jammed and stacked end to end on long tables, flea-market style. Posters and art objects accompany them and spill up the walls, such as Tanja Ostojić’s infamous “EU Panties” (see photo above). Navigation here is a chance operation and I talk to authors whenever possible. The first is Bettina Allamoda, whose source book “catwalk to history” (Revolver Publishing, 2011) presents the history and heroes of growing up in East Berlin during the Wall. It style-checks Roxy Music, the Red Army Faction, and Liza Minelli amongst others who made a difference to Red-rationed teen-angst. These mostly black and white, pre-digital images, are as monumental as Krushchev. They inspire Allamoda’s re-purposed architectural and fashion scraps that become giant installations and sculpture that compliment and critique their sites and sources. These have frequently taken place in the former East as part of new hotels and other style/population/gentrification/exploding plastic inevitables. We complain about the lack of reading space and noise level and she encourages me to go to the children’s area and grab a bean bag.

While perusing, I hear the Fair’s Public Programs start with Dr. Katja Müeller-Helie and her book “The Legacy of Transgressive Objects” (August Verlag, 2018). Müeller-Helie and curator Eva Wilson speak about the current age as one of perpetual transgression in the face of the decline of 1968-style revolutionary actions. According to them, the progressiveness of institutions, technologies, and political figures prevails over the contemporary ambience of recursion, inaction, and social media whinging. Books themselves are positioned as transgressive objects, ones of critical discourse as opposed to self-cancelling explanations to attention-sucking trolls.

I return “catwalk of history” and almost literally run into Nina Prader of Lady Liberty Press. She has no table nor chair and is stationed in a transient zone with gumball machines that dispense her ‘zines. Next to them, on wire racks, is the book “Voices/ Stimmen:  Reclaiming the Public as a Political Space” (Lady Liberty and ZK/U Presses, 2018). It documents and reflects the outcomes of five artists’ public engagement projects: Assembly, Pop, Memory, Violence, and Holy War. Her own contribution concerns a monument at a former Concentration Camp train station in Moabit. It references Marianne Hirsch’s book “The Generation of Post Memory” (Columbia University Press, 2012) and uses a card game to engage the memories of trauma survivors’ offspring and archive their memories.

Finally, I make it to Ma Bibliothèque, whose founder Sharon Kivland recently gave a hilarious Yelp-style performance of Sigmund Freud’s vacation postcards at Hopscotch Reading Room (Freud’s Views, Appendix V, Ma Bibliothèque, 2018). Replete with self-damning indignation, intolerance, and indulgence, the Id is strong with this one. M.B.’s titles are smart and naughty (especially in French), such as: “Beyond Walter Benjamin’s Paris and Kenneth Goldsmith’s New York”, by Michael Hampton, and “A Casa Mia, ou La Pensée de Derrière” by Aude Anquetil. We are both feeling overwhelmed by the fair and the thought occurs that like most conferences it was probably done with an online spreadsheet leaving no room for the physical and mental space needed to internalize information. Sharon’s take is that this is her last fair and I tend to agree, then remember that Payam Sharifi from Slavs and Tartars, is speaking about their book “Wrippen and Scrippen” (Hatje Cantz, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kunstverein Hannover, 2018).

Sharifi recaps the book’s points about alphabets as political, if not emotional platforms. S.A.T.’s typically arcane, erudite blending of poetics and politics includes gender fluidity in Hurufism (a 14th century Muslim science) and Germany’s relationship with Islam and Orientalism through the tetragraph [dsch]. At the end of the talk it is revealed that all of Slavs and Tartars’ books are downloadable on their website, which Sharifi says, “isn’t going to make our publisher happy, but it’s a sign of the economy”.  Like reading the Bible then rubbing out a genie, this is a refinement of pleasure and commerce that favors the virtual, then the analog. Friends with Books lives up to its name as the satisfied crowd reaches for their cigarettes, but I can’t relax as I wish to manifest my own copy of “The Legacy of Transgressive Objects”. Pushing through the crowd to the publisher’s table, all of them have disappeared.

Projecting
[Space]

Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods,
Jeroen Peeters & Josef Wouters
Reinbeckhallen/HAU, Berlin
October 7, 2018

photo by the author
(this article first appeared in Hair and Nails #13)

It takes an hour and four changes to get here, through suburbs, forests, and industrial zones so designed that a giant hand arranging toy trains is always implied. I practice German for “do you have an extra ticket” as I have been assured in a very German box office way that the waiting list is full and I “for sure will not get in”. Erasmus, a Finn, grants my entrance gratis with three minutes to go. Tic scanned and wrist banded, I walk the planks to a riverfront park in front of Reinbeck’s defunct thread factory.

Projecting [Space] starts like Burning Man, but in a grassy field. Silver panted bright colored tech hippies drape clothes over a car with flashing hazards. They raise an antenna, lay on the roof, and unpack in a dusk not quite cold enough to see breath. Harsh light blinds and highlights the deer fenced, soccer sized field giving it a refugee camp vibe (apparently the fence repels vagrants). Pre-recorded crickets, crows, and ambient synths create a quasi-native peace for we one-hundred or so audience members who mill towards scenes and sounds broadcast from trees and grounds. Techno-hippies aside, other figures lay scattered and blanketed, sometimes consoled by one another. Two BMX’ers and their blue-toothed Reggae circle us, adding to the mix as a man in oil-black pants is lifted two stories on a forklift, legs spread, arms akimbo, imposing reign. When he comes down, he lays on the machine’s forks like a tusk hammock, then leads it tamely across the periphery. A very pregnant African in a Batman cap walks to the other side and sits under a speakered tree above a beach. She rounds the scene, trance-like, and calls out an audience/performer dichotomy: is she, or isn’t she? I sway hard in my bright red down shell and one-legged tree stance and wonder if others also wonder and/or go with it. They stare and I think of structure, distance, and spiritual economy, in short: all things German. A small Bobcat shovel tractor enters the middle of the field and slowly spins, carving dirt circles. Eventually, a performer stares and telepathically leads it away. The BMX’ers fetch an inflatable boat and bring it across the field as soprano wails and piano arpeggios from “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” swell with a Reggae and techno remix. Every performer has their own musical signature and they blend as we are led out of the park to the factory.

What follows is a guided union of hands cradling, emitting, and receiving energies throughout and including the audience. Monastic approaches train eyes and bodies like four-dimensional chess pieces whose hierarchies re-cycle in large industrial rooms of three-story bunk bed bleacher shelves. Detritus art hangs next to industrial switches and precedes increasing sonic accelerations and volumes in which performers grapple with invisible obstacles, indoor parachuting, and long discursive conversations about becoming smoke. In the finale, a tribal dance with stand-up bass spills us unplugged over bodies dashing the way to a plaza outside. Here we are teased and engulfed by pink and grey fire bombs and pit. Here we map out projections, dance on concrete, write space with eyes, blur cast, crew, and audience.

Ryan Fontaine at Hair and Nails

11.06.2016
In Object in Hair Room and Other Arrays there is the beautiful thing, the erotic thing, the perpetuate-the-jouissance (or beings) thing and it’s everywhere diffused. Half-lives and relatives revolve through materials and time. The Object is the largish painting of a white torso with scraped viscera against a base and wall of designer-y sperm, its own shadow and three series of test swaths in grey and white. Behind its neck ascends a sort of time card of a hand going towards a canted frame that matches the settled slanting of the gallery proper. As the object scatters and morphs into alternate scales and textures, it roots with its gallery: Hair and Nails.

Exhibition titles are materials biting their point of origin whose alphabet continues the Object’s growth. Next it, Brown Rustic Shape with Grated Post is Joy, Use and Aftermath done, sewered yet preserved in autumn haze spectrum. Overheard on a sidewalk: “No, the guitarist shreds cheese with the strings”. Black and white sperm defy and create attraction on (sic) polarized terrains called Good Packaging. After a protrusion, Three White Strips on a Field of Black cites the equals sign as possible double satisfaction. On the far wall Object #1 in Red, Blue and White on a Field of Gold reverses the initial torso’s orientation with invisible hand in dulcet Gibson strokes. Below and to the right, Shelving Unit and Object #1 On Blue, In Relief shift the firmament and again reverse the orientation like a flag a flappin’. Their construction razing zones a grody rebirth from such a burnt idea. Picture the treated concrete wall of a “Billionaire” overlaid with that of sea foam green: a future of perfectible hindsight in face of the scarce.

full article

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