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Pas de Deux
at Dreamsong
Brooks Turner
Gold-plated bronze, bronze, pewter, lead, wood
Loosely organized according to two primary subjects—the still life and the figure—the show opens on the former with Alexa Horochowski’s installation Naturaleza Muerta Con Una Liebre (Still Life With A Hare). Upside down as if dropped from a hand, a shiny brass bunny makes contact with a lead carpet. The gesture is dynamic and fluid, maintaining the lightness of a rabbit in motion despite the weight of metal. The plinth that supports the sculpture is small and hidden, allowing the edges of the carpet to ripple as if by a breeze. Subtle impressions in the metal trace a line around the edge, providing a minimal gesture of pattern without erasing its raw, sculptural materiality. The softness of the lead holds marks accumulated in time—scratches, scuffs, folds, bevels, carvings—offering an apt metaphor for history: the blank uniformity of the object at a distance becomes a cacophony of intentions and accidents up close, a ground on which new events will take place. And indeed, for Horochowski a number of histories make their way into the work: Paul Thek’s The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper, Horochowski’s own memory of her mother skinning and cooking a hare at a campsite, and the violent history of Patagonia during Argentina’s Dirty War. These entangled narratives make Naturaleza Muerta Con Una Liebre feel less like a scene and more like a dream, and through its surrealism references the literary genre of Magic Realism, itself rooted in Argentina.
Archival pigment print, Edition of 3 + 1AP. 40 x 32 in.
Pao Houa Her’s photographs, both Untitled (from My Mother’s Flowers), at first glance feel rote and mundane, but upon investigation the work unfolds in rich detail as the flowers reveal themselves as made from fabric and plastic. Collected from thrift stores by Her’s mother, the flowers suspend mortality as representations of life that will outlive their referents. The vases are themselves artworks, and each photograph becomes a representation of a representation, increasing the stillness of the image through recursion. In the context of this exhibition, Her’s work proposes an intimate and localized view of art history, diverging from the monolithic grandeur with which the subject is typically treated.
Distemper on linen. 8 x 10 in.
Rubin Nusz addresses the still life through three paintings in the style of Morandi but with looser marks, larger brushes, and greater translucency, using distemper rather than oil paint. Initially, they feel like faithful copies, capturing my memory of a Morandi. However, on closer inspection, the paintings break down into studies by an admirer. They look like they were pleasurable for the artist to make. Quoted in exhibition materials, Jay Heikes describes the artist’s idols as “ghosts that forever haunt the artist and without constant exorcisms they become too seductive to ignore, usually grabbing hold every once-in-a-while for a Faustian pas de deux [...] resulting in a derivative, didactic conduit instead of an original, abstract belief system. But maybe originality is overrated or a flat out myth..." Nusz is seduced by Morandi—and I do not blame him for that—but his paintings fail to seduce me as a viewer.
In addition to his quote, Heikes’ also contributed a painting, titled Phantom of the Underground. The exhibition text frames and explains his many references and inspirations—Faust, Marlowe, Goethe, Munch, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the cult musical Phantom of Paradise—and offers additional poetic insights on art making while adrift in a sea of references, but these words do not appear in the painting. As an object, Phantom of the Underground feels unfinished or like a backdrop for a play with missing actors. In another context, different artworks or objects might have become performers in front of Heikes’ painting, activating the theatrical quality of the work and impacting the feel of the space as a whole. But, in this otherwise subdued gallery, its scale and color palette are jarring.
Oil on stained canvas. 112 x 75 in.
“Pas de Deux,” as a concept understood through Heikes’ quote, proposes that art historical mimicry is a kind of duet, at times a double image (as in the case of Nusz), and at others a pair working in idiosyncratic relation. The latter can be seen in diptychs by Justine Di Fiore and Joann Verburg, which both reference figurative artworks from Italy’s late medieval and renaissance periods. Verburg’s diptych After Giotto is beautiful in the way it compresses space, flattening each figure into a dynamic gesture just as Giotto did nearly 700 years ago. But, the imagery reads to me as uncritical, beauty for beauty’s sake, which in the context of art history feels doctrinaire. Di Fiore’s diptych offers painted reflections on Michelangelo’s final sculpture the Rondanini Pietà. In each canvas, the unfinished quality of the referent is captured in gestural brushstrokes, which radiate from the subject into a surrounding storm of psychedelic color. Ghostly figures and flora emerge from the swirling color—are they visitors to the Sfozesco Castle? Or maybe ghosts of other artists that have found inspiration in Michelangelo…
Oil on Canvas (Diptych). 30 x 53 1/2 in.
Two gelatin silver prints, Diptych, Ed. of 5. 34 x 24 in. each
Where I see ghosts in Di Fiore, I see archaeological fragments in Kim Benson’s Tileset. At first the work appears entirely abstract, organized by gridded patterns of overlapping vertical lines, horizontal lines, and Xs, rendered in Benson’s signature style of masking and layering. In places, the grid feels stable, while in others subtle curves in the lines carving horizontally through layers of paint cause hallucinatory undulations of the surface, as if a gossamer veil hangs between viewer and image. But attempting to part one veil within the work only leads to another, and another, and another. The viewer becomes like an archaeologist, excavating layers, extracting patterns, remnants, looking for the deepest moments in the work’s history. The most recognizable form is a fingernail, which helps a thumb and three knuckles take shape. The fragmented hand that emerges from abstraction belongs to Portrait of the Artist’s Son Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos, a painting by El Greco which depicts his son holding in one hand a paintbrush and in the other a palette. Benson has cropped in around the hand holding the palette, but the details of the palette are lost in layers of paint and abstraction. These layers are physical—Benson’s process involves applying and removing paint and tape over and over again—but they are also metaphorical: the tile-like pattern is architectural, mosaic, and digital. Benson’s grid atomizes the picture plane just as a computer screen breaks down into grids of pixels, and each pixel holding red, green, and blue light becomes a palette for transmitting digital information, just as an artist’s palette was once the primary means of transmitting information visually. Today, our engagement with history is almost always mediated by a screen, and that mediation is often further mediated by the way history is propagandized, for example, through the military-entertainment complex which dominates Hollywood. Benson’s work thus gives us the truest version of what history is and always has been: obscured, abstract, fragmentary, and psychedelic. Art history is no different.
Oil and enamel on shellacked linen over panel. 18 x 24 x 1¾ in.
The landscape enters as an interlude. Works by David Goldes and Verburg lead into Moyra Davey’s film Forks and Spoons, which places the figure in the landscape. Davey’s film is the most sophisticated exploration of authorship in Pas de Deux as the artist positions herself in relation to four artists who died young. Davey, herself in her mid-60s, reflects on time, aging, and the body as she presents the work of these artists in a kind of experimental documentary. The cadence of Davey’s voice as she narrates starts and stops in short phrases creating a rhythm that for me is reminiscent of a typewriter, emphasizing and aestheticizing the archival research that shaped the narrative. She appears to recite her words from an audio recording playing in her ears, giving shape to the recursive quality of research and of history. Some say history repeats, others say history rhymes, but in whatever the form, repetition always has its own agency, its own ontology, that is seldom captured or even acknowledged by the false-objectivity by which we experience the past.
Graphite, molding paste, black gesso on paper. 27 x 22 in.
Pas de Deux engages “art history” through a very narrow lens where each artist is positioned in relation to artists of the western canon, most of whom are white men. Overall, the show is beautiful and thought provoking, but given this narrow scope, I can’t help but meditate on the way this exhibition illustrates the whiteness of art history. Or, more specifically, it shows how our eyes are still directed onto the aesthetics of the classical world, which is inseparable from the violence of whiteness, imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation. Trump’s “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” requires all federal buildings to be based on classical architecture, which positions this aesthetic past in a historical lineage with his American fascist present and potential future. “The Art World” is conservative; anything that positions itself as a monolith always is. In this Art World, we are accustomed to seeing contemporary artists make references to past artists, but so often these references are uncritical, disconnected from the broader historical contexts in which they arise. The best works in Pas de Deux—by Horochowski, Her, Benson, and Davey—go beyond the monolith and engage something deeper about our relationship to history, about time and erasure, about how we remember and internalize the past both individually and socially.
HD Video with sounds, 26:33 mins