Reality: Is This Thing On?
Reality: Is This Thing On?
Waiting-room-purgatory-minimalism at Ashes/Ashes. The work of Darren Bader, Ted Lawson and Jason Brown. Applied meanings and what have you.
The works of Ashes/Ashes group show, ‘a) Virtuality’ are not site-specific, the gallery is art-specific.
The gallery sitter tells me he keeps sunglasses on hand for long stretches under the vicious white lights. It’s here Darren Bader, Ted Lawson and Jason Brown ask a world disemboweled by information, flirting with accelerationist ideas: what confines humanity, who defines reality? An all-illuminating drop ceiling grid and blacked out windows; optimal conditions for looking at this introspective moment in history and the invasive reality denoted in Zach Bruder’s accompanying essay.
Inside this four-walled reality deprivation tank it seems absurb not to assume this show, this gallery, have been expecting you. Ashes/Ashes waiting-room-purgatory-minimalism is the perfect place for these artists to stretch their legs in disquieting dualities: the real and virtual, the human and other; the myth of progress and prosperity as a two-for-one deal.
“Do we really want to be free?” Byun Chuy Han wrote, “Didn't we invent God so we wouldn't have to be free?”. Maybe every invention since has been singing this same old song, shifted only in melody. The insatiable desire to innovate - create in one’s image - is an expression of man’s paradoxical longing for liberation and containment. “Do we really want to be free?” Last year, prompted by a trip to the place of perpetual end-time hedonism, Miami, I asked “Would we know the end if we saw it, if we were living it? It wouldn’t look like we think.” I cannot excuse quoting myself for that I’m sorry, but in the race of the actual, virtual and unmediated commerce, the thought runs another lap.
Darren Bader’s glossy car doors lean mirrored against the wall, a smart device shade of blue-gray, the other a Mattel-grade aqua — leftovers from the last invention touting transcendence. Smoothness is always an attribute of perfection, noted Roland Barthes, in the same essay he declared cars equal creations in divinity to cathedrals.
Bader’s car doors are untraceable to human intervention, two dismembered limbs of a Honda. (What else is detached in advancement?) A non-threatening cartoon-bubble sticker on anchor #5(b) reads: ‘astride the perfect equinox’. In the equinox, two moments intersect and in the ascension toward perfection, every edge will be rounded. The doors could moonlight as tombstones: for the optimism technical advancements once induced in working people (carrot dangling aside). For the uncomplicated pleasure material items once indulged in their buyers and the plain-speaking status acquiring them once signified. “Anchors” for class and conformity. In a Bader-made world: the past never leaves, the present is never finished and the future never comes, our backs too often turned.
Aluminum panels bonded by automotive filler are the base of Jason Brown’s meticulously airbrushed split-screen paintings. A flesh-toned putty bleeds from the middle and corrodes from inside out, two human figures divided by a smearing of industrial filler. The photo-realism is destabilizing in a doppelgänger, a painting impersonates a painting, sort of way. Cause to doubt your human faculties. Is it paint, digital, a photograph? Brown sweeps an arm welcoming you to the present: your ideas of truth are no good here.
Shroud 7 (Green Guy/Beekeeper) places a faceless man in a neon green bodysuit beside a beekeeper in head-to-toe protective gear. The subjects, like their maker’s hand remain concealed, in notable symmetry to the conditions in which the works are made: masked, gloved, and in a dust-free air-tight room. A confrontation Brown brings to the myth of the artist, the fetishized “hand” the “maker’s mark” and even the aestheticized artist’s studio, an image minted (and arguably simulated) into collective consciousness through the internet, the virtual.
Shroud 7 doesn’t dawdle, butting the organic against the artificial. A beekeeper tends to their hive beside a spandex-suited man in front of a green screen. The green screen: where people function as props in constructions of the false and make-believe. A manipulation of reality that does, all contemporaries considered, feel rather quaint. Constructing what others ordain real or true, without trace, is shaping a person’s understanding of the world. A power of this potency, even those sat on God’s lap find temptation. Know a guy? The split screen, a technique used for narrative compression, is often deployed to draw attention to itself. It is consistently self-referential, but in Brown’s hands the self reference falls on us. The viewer has no option but to infer and compare the images married before us. The montage of Shroud 7 is made in space not time, images served without plot or context, Brown pulls its a great distance from that familiarized in film and closer to the BYO-meaning-making of the scroll.
Ted Lawson’s two-toned Animal Paintings hover off the wall, one matte colored layer of aluminum contrasted atop another: yellow on royal blue, marigold on mauve. The odd irregular shapes, (paper hand cut by the artist scanned and printed) become one interconnected whole, marked faintly by delineated lines. The paintings make an effort to conjure networks of information, resting places of encrypted meaning: intricated circuits, data visualizations, cartography, and the eternally sexy art-writing comparison, the Rorschach test. A map-like sprawl and microchip density.
The urge to compute and rearrange arises and we go in search of clear signage and well trodden grooves to find a place of logic, comprehension and coherence. Coyly but knowingly, Lawson puts the human experience in (data) drag, reformatting people as information, quantifiers and statistics, or at least the creeping normality to understand it as such.
Lawson lays an intricate mass before us, jigsawed with abstract figures of the earthbound: clutched hands, limbs on limbs, the veins of a leaf; small precise incisons grant visibility to what is underneath. Saying through doing, Lawson gestures toward an attempt to refine the primitive, pairing the modern (digital methods) and archaic (paper scissors). The waters between human made and machine made are muddied.
The same contaminated waters each of the artists swim in.
The show has questions and those questions have questions — what is deemed reality, a simulation, who decides? But the one that floats is: will we always have an answer?
a) Virtuality is on view until August 31 at Ashes/Ashes gallery.