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work

The following is a selection of writing samples.

KARLA BLACK: Sugarplum dreams & cellophane nightmares

Karla Black’s sculptures are all sugarplum candy dreams and cellophane suffocation nightmares, children’s and parents’, respectively. Fragile, vast, and impossible, the very word 'sculpture' seems too solid. Crumpled clouds sag from the ceiling and particulate matter diffuses across the floor—pastel lunar landscapes made from makeup and bath bombs and soap and chalk. Her works permeate the senses, while also threatening to evanesce before the eyes. Art historian Briony Fer contends that her "[s]culpture…dissolves structure through…transparency and pulverization" (1). Sometimes they seem in domestic disrepair, like a sloppy, disintegrating vintage bathroom, outfitted with a powder blue tub and a clear vinyl shower curtain. Visceral, tactile, and sensual, Black's sculptures are also environments: a playground for children with sweet talcummed bums and too-adult makeup, or a parlor for fashionable Victorians with powdered wigs over dirty hair and syphilis scars.

1 Briony Fer, “Karla Black’s abstraction,” Karla Black: Scotland + Venice. Exh. cat. (Glasgow: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 2011; published on the occasion of the artist’s solo presentation at the 54th Venice Biennale), n.p.

excerpt from retired blog Rogue Rave

essay: VICTORIA MODESTO, PROTOTYPE FOR THE FUTURE

The screen goes black. The music has stopped. A slow tapping sound like an ice pick on a window alternates with the sound of footsteps, as a white stage and the legs of a performer come into view. One leg is bare, a conventionally sexy woman’s leg ending in a towering heelless shoe. The other is less expected: rather than flesh and bone, there is a sleek black blade, a dark stalactite beginning at the knee and ending in a dangerous point. The spike taps and slices across the glassy surface of the floor producing the sound of a knife dragging across a plate. Scintillating, yet eerie. A dark and thrilling walking-dance has begun. Its dancer, Viktoria Modesta, punctuates the choreography with stabs at the icy floor, shattering the surface wherever the point of her spike prosthetic leg connects. It’s an appendage but also a weapon, and the result is fiercely beautiful.

Modesta’s music video, Prototype, features multiple vignettes that represent ideas of rebellion, difference, sex, and general bad-assery. A TV cartoon Modesta reminiscent of Betty Boop inspires a young girl to rip the leg off her doll and use the toy to repeatedly stab another doll, all to the horror of the girl’s mother. A boy carves “VM” into his desk, while, in another scene, Modesta enters the room with a prosthetic that flickers and buzzes to life like a fluorescent light surrounded with moths. A smug Modesta is detained by uniformed men resembling Nazis, who interrogate her for being a symbol of the people. They show her a photo of a man who has his leg cut off (possibly self-inflicted) making a peace sign.

excerpt from retired blog Rogue Rave

exhibition review: touch the spindle at capital gallery

At Capital Gallery a fairytale is unfolding, but rather than a magic pumpkin carriage, an exploding hearse awaits you.

Capital’s inaugural exhibition, Touch the Spindle, combines work by Virginia Overton, Will Rogan, and Cynthia Daignault. The fairytale theme  is fitting for Capital’s first show since it introduces the gallery’s petite space with an Alice-in-Wonderland-style (dis)orientation regarding scale that is as an invitation to EAT, DRINK, and expect big things from small packages.

Curatorially, Touch the Spindle is a carefully thought out show. Five total artworks by the three artists are arranged in a way that creates distinct pairings and direct lines between the pieces. For example, Will Rogan’s two photographs, depicting his exploding hearse, are situated across the room from Cynthia Daignault’s pair of canvases that make up her piece Mirror, Mirror. A quadrant of Virginia Overton’s hair-wrapped light tubes oversee the show from the high-up Rapunzel vantage point of the ceiling; while Rogan’s  hanging mobile, made up of shards from the exploded hearse, bisects the space vertically. These interactive lines crisscross the gallery, producing a show that feels organized and clearly suggestive, like a host who politely introduces party guests to one another in order to strike up conversation between them.

From Spinning Records to Spinning Gold (Rapunzel-style)

Recently opened in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Capital Gallery is the latest venture by collaborators Jonathan Runcio and Bob Linder. Linder and Runcio, who are also friends and colleagues of mine, have been collaborating since the inception of their “Let’s Get Weird” night every other Friday at the Rock Bar. At Let’s Get Weird they spin records, play art videos, and stage performative entertainment, such as xerox parties and sculptural hotdog nights. With Capital, they have expanded their partnership to a more permanent space.

In many ways, their 100 square foot storefront location works in their favor. Rather than feeling constrained by the small size of the gallery, Runcio and Linder seem to be reveling in it. During the show’s opening—not able to fit in the gallery all at once—a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, luring in more onlookers to the already well-attended event. While the usual reception chaos means you can barely see the artwork, gallery-goers took turns going inside only a few at a time. This meant we all had plenty of breathing room inside and out, as well as an unobstructed viewing experience (not to mention a gallery that was immaculately clean by the end; a benefit for the proprietors more than the crowd, but nonetheless).

Exhibiting Magic

Will Rogan’s works deal with time. The two photographs in Touch the Spindle are close relations of the video Rogan created last year of a hearse being blown up, titled Erased. In Erased, which was filmed with an appropriately-named Phantom camera that takes 6,900 frames per second, Rogan turned a symbol of death, a hearse, into an epic slow motion film. The spectacle of Hollywood pyrotechnics is elongated into a thing of beauty in which a few seconds becomes 6 minutes, and booming sound is transformed into a slow growl. Time is a reminder of mortality, and Rogan drags it out to extreme proportions, conflating the concepts of death and beauty with a comical twist (Watch a video on the making of Rogan’s Erased here). Unlike the video, however, the photos in Touch the Spindle minimize the explosion to only two phases: before and after, the hearse and the cloud created by the explosion.

Like a magic trick in which now you see it and (POOF!) now you don’t, time is cut out of the middle and the object disappears in the snap of a finger. Recalling another work by Rogan, an artist book of magicians’ obituaries, the photos give the hearse, an object that represents the serious, melancholy obligations of life, a shiny topcoat of magic. It’s clear that Rogan is a magician artist, reminding the viewer that things are not always as they seem.

excerpt from retired blog Rogue Rave

IN THE GAME OF STRIP POKER THERE ARE NO LOSERS

Two curious figures with faces painted like Venetian masks occupy a bedroom that is delicately rendered in watery green pinstripes. The fanciful quality of their costumes is offset by the fact that they are only half dressed. Mirroring one another in their long flowing white hair, slim waists, arm tattoos, and shirtless nudity, they sit atop the matching tuxedo tails they have recently shed. In the midst of a capricious game of cards, most likely strip poker, they stare out at the viewer, expanding the space of the interior to envelope me, drawing me into their effervescent world. The setting of the room seems at once an ordinary bedroom and a fantastic theater in a rich, imaginary world. I feel privy to be a voyeur in the space of their bedroom, and my desire to join them is echoed by the left figure, who, with open pants, invites me in with a jaunty head tilt and exaggerated jester smile. At the same time, however, I feel hesitant to invade. The other more stoic-faced figure, possibly surprised at my intrusion, covers voluptuous breasts with a fan of cards. The bedroom is culturally coded as a private space, and the world that this painting opens up is one of unabashed erotic play.

Aurie Ramirez, the Philippines-born artist of this whimsical watercolor world, has a distinct and sophisticated style that brings to life a particular and peculiar cast of characters and settings littered with formalwear, pinstripes, and painted faces, repeated ad infinitum. The flat files of Creative Growth overflow with her watercolor and ink works. Many of her paintings are almost identical iterations representing an intense devotion to her subject matter, which stems from an amalgamation of popular culture references, including 18th-century dandyism, Venetian masquerade, glam rock, and macabre gothic costuming.

Sexual acts and erotic pleasures are recurring themes in Ramirez’s art, and the foregrounding of sex in Untitled, from 2000 (fig. 1), is a playful and productive gesturing to the intersection of sex and disability. Often infantilized, disabled bodies are rarely seen as desiring subjects or objects of sexual desire in the cultural imagination. More often than not, disability is disassociated from ideas of sexual activity, reserving sex and sexiness for abled bodies. When persons with disabilities are understood in the context of sexuality, they are typically regarded as not in control of their own bodies and restricted in both sexual expression and access to sexual experiences, particularly in the context of institutionalization. Often people with disabilities are subject to intense surveillance due to their being regarded as needing protection from themselves and others and/or regarded as displaying inappropriate sexualized behaviors in public.1 As social science researchers Daniel Goodley and Rebecca Lawthorn assert, the disabled-and-sexed body is in many ways seen as an oxymoron.2 Simultaneously associated with both infantilized asexuality and over-sexualized “perversion,” they are represented as lacking and in excess.

Additionally, notions of the “carnivalesque” continue to loom large in contemporary culture’s understanding of disabled bodies and sex. Just as disabled-and-sexualized bodies are culturally coded as both lack and excess, they are also both invisible and highly visible. The non-normative disabled body is at once disavowed and spectacularly fetishized — on sideshow display for public fascination, yet denied agency and subjecthood.3 Recently, critical disability studies scholars have begun problematizing these assumptions and querying what it would look like to consider the intersections of sexuality and disability as potentiality and possibility, rather than sexual lack or excess. Instead of thinking of disabled-and-sexed bodies in terms of deficiency and limit, what if the real limitation was acknowledged as the narrow scope of normative ableist conceptions of sex and sexuality? Similarly, rather than fetishized spectacular objects, what if the gawking stare directed at the “carnivalesque” could be repositioned as an interactive gaze,4 in which extraordinary disabled bodies exercising powerful agency and subjecthood participate?

The “carnival” in Aurie Ramirez’s work does not permit the usual derogatory associations with disability; instead, it is spun into enchanting displays of color, delicate wavering line, and a fascinating array of characters, costumes, and environments. Ramirez’s works do not shy away from the carnivalesque; the sideshow spectacle connotation is conjured and then usurped. Untitledtransforms the gawking stare aimed at the fetish object into a desiring gaze exchange that opens up space for an intersubjective interaction between viewer and the work’s desiring subjects. In looking at Untitled,I am made conscious of my own body. As I gaze at them, the figures look back at me with Olympia-like agency and audacity. They involve me in their private, erotically playful space, but the alluring invitation of the left figure and the hesitation of the figure on the right generate a push and pull tension that makes me self-conscious of my participation and voyeurism. This creates a complex relationship with the artwork, and one that relates the bodies of the figures to my own body, and their desires to my desires. The costuming, makeup, and décor form an appropriation of the “carnivalesque” that enhances the desirability of the scene. In Ramirez’s works, the carnival is the material from which alluring, imaginative alternative worlds are constructed.