黑料不打烊

JANUARY 7 鈥� MARCH 5, 2011

With an emphasis on performative installations, the screening of avant-garde film and emerging artistic dialogues, the Kitchen, now 40 years into its tenure, has long since established itself as a hotbed for experimental exchange. This month鈥檚 programming delivers on all fronts in a triangulation of seminal events: Dave Miko and Tom Thayer鈥檚 collaborative debut, 鈥淣ew World Pig鈥�; Cauleen Smith鈥檚 three-channel video installation, 鈥淩EMOTE VIEWING鈥�; and Brent Green鈥檚 first feature-length foray into cinematic storytelling, 鈥淕ravity Was Everywhere Back Then.鈥� While stylistically dissimilar, all three pulse with the off-beat rhythm of an outsider鈥檚 perspective, their aberrant environments finding collective voice in narratives culled equally from the actual and the imagined. Reality has a tentative foothold here. What pervades, rather, is an overarching message of escapism鈥攁 desire for release from the torturous demands of the real world, the pain of memory and living that haunts our sense of self as much as it haunts the images that comprise the individual works. The result is akin to the German Klartraum, or lucid dreaming.

In the simplest terms, a lucid dream is defined as one in which the dreamer is aware of their unconscious state. Such waking manifestations of the subconscious are often characterized by vibrant, kaleidoscopic colors and a hallucinatory intensity that make it difficult to distinguish between real and unreal. Dave Miko and Tom Thayer鈥檚 site-specific installation, 鈥淣ew World Pig,鈥� taps into such repressed hypnagogic reveries, with five stop-motion animated storyboards catalogued in two, three, and four dimensions.

聽鈥淎 New World Pig Allotropic鈥� (2010-11) acts as the cornerstone of the duo鈥檚 collaborative efforts and, at 27:10, is by far the longest of the videos in duration. Here, phantasmagoric images slowly fade in and overlap each other as a simple and archetypically ambiguous tale unfolds in hyper-color intonations: A hunter kills a wild pig in the forest, brings it back to his home to be slaughtered and dresses his dog, his companion throughout the venture, in the skin of the animal. This Jockum Nordstr枚mian-like figure then proceeds to tear down his house and build an altar of sorts beneath a barren freeway backdrop, only to burn the structure to the ground in the film鈥檚 final moments. Desolate landscapes, punctuated by waves of flickering static, eerily populate other works in this lo-fi canon, 鈥淣ostrum Rostrum鈥� and 鈥淐amber Clamber Squinch Winch,鈥� (all 2010-11), speaking directly to Thayer鈥檚 use of outmoded video techniques and proclivity for commonplace collage materials such as rough-hewn cardboard.

Thayer has made a name for himself creating elaborately-rigged shadow puppet theater displays and collages; his most recent exhibition of such work showcased at the Derek Eller Gallery earlier this year. Miko, on the other hand, is a Yale-trained painter with a penchant for minimalist gestures in enamel on aluminum panel. The two would seem to make for odd bedfellows but what they鈥檝e unearthed with 鈥淣ew World Pig鈥� is esoterically absorbing; a dialogue of sorts between and across disciplines that mines the depths of both artists鈥� potential and inserts a fresh perspective into the contemporary debate waged over two-dimensional validity. Here, Miko鈥檚 minimalist nods, customarily calculated and pensive, take on a new life, activating the background texture of Thayer鈥檚 lo-fi video work with the delicate crackle of a slow burning flame. Conversely, Thayer鈥檚 collagist assemblages evince a new-fangled subtlety within the context of the painter鈥檚 thinly veiled aluminum sheets, all calculatingly hung at various eye levels throughout the space. Together, the artists achieve a meta-painterliness that translates into an act of world-building鈥攐ne that is pensive, considered, and eloquently enchanting in its fusion of digital and folkloric two-dimensional forms.

Cauleen Smith鈥檚 adjacently exhibited 鈥淩EMOTE VIEWING鈥� offers a reluctant score for Miko and Thayer鈥檚 project鈥攁 church bell, the hum of military helicopters flying overhead, ubiquitous murmurs of wind and water鈥攗nintentionally aiding in the paintings鈥� dramatic effects: the hunter鈥檚 actions amplified, the death of the pig pronounced by Smith鈥檚 triptych ode to absence and loss. Smith鈥檚 self-proclaimed filmic intentionality, present in the form of a 鈥渧iolence of erasure,鈥� constructs holes that the 2-D works indelibly fill. Indeed, the California native鈥檚 video-based ouevre is imbued by such metaphorical tropes of absence and transition: the excavation of a sand-blasted church site and subsequent burial of the abandoned structure; the gridding off of a remote field with neon line, as if the land lay in wait for an unnamed developer to arrive. Each act speaks to the sense of alienation and loss that is the inevitable byproduct of a trauma of displacement鈥攐ne that results in an erasure of identity and financial (and emotional) bankruptcy.

Brent Green鈥檚 鈥淕ravity Was Everywhere Back Then鈥� typifies another agenda all together. As opposed to a reductive methodology, the self-taught Green functions at the polar end of the spectrum, having hand-fabricated the entire set of his feature-length film in the backyard of his rural home in Pennsylvania. Loosely based on the real world story of Leonard Wood, an eccentric man-cum-urban legend who achieved mythic status after the death of his wife compelled him to obsessively augment his home, Green constructs a love-story of epic proportions. The film was screened at the Kitchen with a live performance by the artist on February 17-18, 2011.

As Arthur Schopenhauer said in the early 1800s, 鈥淒reams are brief madness and madness a long dream.鈥�