JACK THE PELICAN PRESENTS: Artists & Previous Shows
Gentlemen, If I Had Been Able to Read and Write I'd Have Destroyed the Human Race
With berserk glee, Bercowetz plunges into the pell-mell of pre-politics, where nascent activism and thuggery meet. He takes his cues from the German Anti-Fa movementóskinny punk rockers who bring out the knuckles on skinheadsóand Tupac Shakur. It is an in-your-face engagement with macho juvenilia, an all-out, all-over collision of images, objects and bad words.
The space of the gallery is dominated by five large sculptures, among them, a "bamboo" podium enshrouded in fog and encased in a plexiglass crystal, a totemic, flintstone-modern video surveillance tower and a merzbau-like behemoth, suggestive of a desert outpost, complete with its own fountain. They are bricolaged primarily of recycled, low-grade materials, painted black, white, brown or day-glo, and bristling with elements of drawing and collage.
Paintings
Henders's paintings are large, spare and sexy. They are reminiscent of that bachelor-cool era, 1962-75. Go go dancers and playboys. Strut and tease.
And they are pictures, repeated and displaced, producing that film projector is stuck effect. Reminiscent of Muybridge, but more precisely spellbinding. Almost psychedelic.
Translations of Jean Genet
David Hutchinsonís slim vertical stripes of pure color are unexpectedly, beautifully abuzz with retinal vibration. But his combinations are insistently peculiar. As though he were attempting a signature plunge into some uncharted terrain of taste. Indeed! These are translations of the works of the great sinner/genius Jean Genet.
For Hutchinson, Genet is the perfect vehicle to probe the tensions between ethics and aesthetics. That the names of his characters, titles and fragments translate into color sequences of such astounding visual coherence may be a mystery. But to read these paintings, all one need know/guess is the first letter of each colorís name. It is a playful, A-is-for-apple conceit, tantalizingly accessible, yet elusive. Still, the pleasure may reside less in reading than in seeing the passage bloom into sight.
The Universe Is Expanding In Its Acceleration
"Astronomers Report Evidence of 'Dark Energy' Splitting the Universe" reads a recent New York Times headline. It is "one of the strangest astronomical findings in recent years." And the astrophysicists themselves are left scratching their heads in dumbfounded awe.
Such stunning cosmic speculations now unfolding in the popular news media are the subject of Laura Emrick's new work.
Bestiary
To see a grown man try to look like a Boolaboo. Or say, a howling monkey. Really try. With little in the way of props. Only the muscles and bones of his face and body, and grim determination. That is something.
In Lars Kremer's video installation, Shamanimal, he does just that. But he does other animals too. Even little ones. It is for Kremer a move beyond self-consciousness, motive and intention. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Arnulf Rainer's drug-induced regressions into infantilism. But equally removed from the world of fashion wherein the rhetoric of pose translates into the possibility of evacuation and transcendence. Kremer truly inhabits his body. And in sloughing culturally-proscribed scriptings of flesh, he becomes keenly, primally alert. Like a lizard.
Contemporary Nature in a Subdivision World
The title of this exhibition references the upstanding citizen's pride and vanity in the unbroken, virginal perfection of an artificial green. And the American right to leisure.
The ten featured artists portray a fully domesticated, plastic landscape. Their manicured and seamless surfaces are numb. These are musings on lives imagined in the absence of work, politics and critical thought. They are bemused, detached, delighted-and haunted with anxiety.
Jerry Kearns Yoshio Itagaki
Susan Ingraham Andrea Ackerman
Laura Emrick Rick Albee
Suzanne Walters Adela Leibowitz
Sheri Warshauer Joan Linder
