My Hands Are My Bite Lilli Carré, Laura Davis, Carol Jackson, Diane Simpson Curated by Dan Gunn 7 June – 2 August, 2014
This publication was created on the occasion of group exhibition My Hands Are My Bite, curated by Dan Gunn in the summer of 2014 at moniquemeloche.
© 2015
My Hands Are My Bite, 2014 Installation view
My Hands Are My Bite Curatorial statement by Dan Gunn Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own. 1 The title "My Hands are My Bite" comes from a work by Laura Davis that references a Gabriel Orozco terra-cotta work from 1991 My Hands Are My Heart with which Davis has a “complicated love / hate relationship".2 The hands in the title are same hands of the handled, the hand-picked, even the man-handled.3 These are the haptics of consumerism: To bite or not to bite. The very metaphor of consumption is aggressive, implying not only the ingestion of products into one's life but the determination of the consumer to either rescue or relegate objects to obscurity. These are the hands of taste –the consumer palette. The four artists in this exhibition, Diane Simpson, Lilli Carré, Laura Davis, and Carol Jackson, use various historical aesthetics. From Art Deco flourishes of the Gilded Age seen in the work of Diane Simpson to the materials of the American frontier that Carol Jackson employs in her worked leather and sculptural forms, to International Style modernism seen in Laura Davis’ vitrine sculpture and Lilli Carré’s blend of folk Americana each artist exhibits a formal poly-temporality and purposeful engagement with vintage decorative styles. In Diane Simpson’s work, a meditation on structure emerges as the content, considering the meaning and history of decorative forms. Moving through an analysis (in the psychoanalytic sense) of design tropes of display, representing and modifying bodies through fashion, and commercial display it becomes a form of analysis of the ideology of style. In her hands these discarded forms of life in Art Deco become models for androgynous new primary forms. With Carol Jackson the aesthetics hail from early American industrialization and its mythic Western frontier. In Jacksons recent sculpture anachronistic sculptural forms drawn out of celebratory Americana sheet music collide with digital webcam imagery. Taken from national park archives, the camera footage catalogs a patch of sky or records a forest fires’ progress. The graphic forms from the sheet music retain their remote and festive
1
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. (New York: Picador, 1990), p 285. Davis, Laura. Interview with the author, 2/23/14 3 In this context, man-handled refers to thrift store shopping and the repeated use of materials 2
feeling, even as they twist outward. Like a webcam of nothing, the sculptures drain the entertainment medium of actual entertainment and unveil it as ruthless, unresponsive and banal. The aesthetics of Mod become a theater of small scale objects and inscribed intricacies in Laura Davis' work. Davis combines the structures of store display and the corporeal bodies of fashion mannequins into tableaus of historical association. In the collision of the handmade and the found, the reality of before and after, the old and the new dissolve leaving a distilled and vulnerable form of style for consideration. For Lilli Carré, the individual is always under construction. In books, animations, sequential drawings, and porcelain ceramic figures the person is always a fragile body; a little too pliable, in need of constant catharsis. Mixing the aesthetics of Modernism with American folk forms the work takes on a provisional character as if social progress needs continual gentle reinforcement and reevaluation. Poly-temporality is the experience of multiple registers of time within the present; where the past is never really gone and the future is already passé. This is easy to experience in fashion where certain articles re-occur ad infinitum or whole subcultures form around fusions of the future and the past like steampunk or others. In Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp she reflects on the relationship between the perception of time and the camp aesthetic. Thinking through past times shifts the experience of the consumer-driven moment and makes its values look arbitrary, overblown and strange. Camp revels in this feeling of strangeness and proudly wears the results in a form of playfulness. While the stylistic forms in this exhibition are arguably outmoded, they eschew camp's outrageousness and detachment, while maintaining the focus on style. In My Hands are My Bite styles are under serious consideration, interrogated for their latent properties, chastised for their relationship to oppressive current practices and mined for their potential as possible new forms of life. This vintage archaeology also represents skepticism of progress as an essential part of the contemporary. Outmoded aesthetics are also useless, archaic, or primitive when viewed from a Modernist historical lens. Here the charge of nostalgia reads as a modernist epithet for skepticism of progress. Past styles are also passed-over styles. Mass cultural style is the product of corporate marketing and relentlessly broadcast through every avenue. This breeds a kind of reactionary fatigue or cultivated skepticism in media consumers. In Concrete Comedy David Robbins describes this fatigue with entertainment’s industrial culture in a passage on the pleasures of "so-bad-its-good" comedy: We resent the shrill tone and [entertainment’s] deafening volume. We've discovered firsthand how inhuman, and inhumane, and just plain boring a seamlessly managed parade of
winners can be. [...] We've seen, in sum, that the particular way that our culture "does" winning too often has something smug and arrogant and kill-joy about it. Cumulatively these observations incline us to admit that a culture of winners fundamentally distorts some fundamental aspect of human existence. 4
What is the experience of the thrift store, antique mall or junk yard if not a perusal of the remainders of culture post-hype, post-fashion? The antique is not automatically better than the contemporary, but rather remote in time and present in body. Present perhaps, in a way that allows all of their aspects to be seen more clearly than the objects of more current marketing campaigns. In each of their ways Simpson, Jackson, Davis, and CarrĂŠ work to revive overlooked aspects of human existence in their objects. Their coordinates are our coordinates: the consumer landscape of commerce, fashion, decor, architecture and style.
4
David Robbins, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy, (Denmark: Pork Salad Press, 2011).
Lilli Carre eight weeks (in the sun), 2014 6 small glazed ceramic pieces on UV glass, construction paper, and wood 5 ½ x 36 x 1 inches
Lilli Carre one day (in the shade), 2014 6 small glazed ceramic pieces on UV glass, construction paper, and wood 5 ½ x 36 x 1 inches
Lilli Carre one second (in the dark), 2014 HD digital video loop on USB stick
Lilli CarrĂŠ (b. 1983 Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist and illustrator currently living in Chicago. Her animated films have shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, and she is the co-founder of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation. She has created several books of comics, most recently the short story collection, Heads or Tails, published by Fantagraphics. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Comics and Best American Non-required Reading, amongst other places. CarrĂŠ is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL.
Laura Davis Cup and Balls (Cool Shell), 2014 Wood, mother of pearl wall covering, steel, wineglasses, resin, mylar, leather, glass paperweight, paper, paint, necklace, plastic Stonehenge pieces, bottle, cement, rhinestone, clay, pewter bowl, sequins, fake flocked rocks, earring backs. 10 x 25 x 59 inches
Cup and Balls (Cool Shell), 2014 (detail)
Laura Davis Cup and Balls (Warm Marble), 2014 Travertine marble pedestal, brass, steel, plastic bag, vintage political button, plastic thistle, wooden candles, felt, paper, paint, wine glasses, clay, rhinestones, books, string, agate, glue, microbeads, page from a Sotheby's catalogue 27 x 15 x 61 inches
Cup and Balls (Warm Marble), 2014 (detail)
Laura Davis Neckslices 2-5, 2014 Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink plastic, and eye shadow. Dimensions variable
Laura Davis Neckslice 3, 2014 Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink plastic, and eye shadow. 14 x 17 ½ x 3 ½ inches
Laura Davis Neckslice 2, 2014 Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink plastic, and eye shadow. 6 x 5 x 3 inches
Laura Davis Neckslice 1, 2014 Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink plastic, and eye shadow. 10 ½ x 5 ½ x 6 ½ inches
Laura Davis My Hand Is My Bite, 2014 Candle, cardboard, chain, plastic, plaster, Flamin' Hot Cheetos, gargoyle, and wood 24 x 12 x 4 inches
Laura Davis (American, b. Holland, MI 1971, lives Chicago, IL) received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2004 and her BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996. She is currently an Instructor of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Davis’ recent solo exhibitions include Unknown Pleasures at Chicago Artist’s Coalition (coinciding with her 2012-2013 Bolt residency there); and Lock the Doors at slow gallery, Chicago, IL, with Jason Dunda. Her upcoming site specific installation, Histrionic Renovation, in the Mies van der Rohe McCormick house at Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL will open on Friday September 12, 2014. Her work has been featured in the group exhibitions Homebodies at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Two Histories of the World (Part 2) at Hyde Park Art Center, both in Chicago, IL. In addition to her Bolt residency last year, Davis has been selected for the 2014 Elsewhere Residency in Greensboro, North Carolina. She’s been reviewed by the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, and Abraham Ritchie listed her work in the “Top 10 of 2011,” for Art Slant.
Carol Jackson Boo, 2014 Paper Mache, encaustic, motor 42 x 34 inches
Carol Jackson Cod Piece, 2014 Paper Mache, acrylic, digital photograph 43 x 28 x 14 inches
Carol Jackson Bouquet Portraits, 2014 Paper Mache, acrylic, digital photograph 37 x 23 x 19 inches
Carol Jackson (lives and works in Chicago, IL) received her BFA in 1987 from the University of California at Los Angeles, followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, where she is now an adjunct associate professor of Contemporary Practices. She’s had several solo exhibitions in Chicago galleries- most recently at Three Walls in 2014, and Slow Gallery in 2013. Jackson is currently featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York. Other recent group exhibitions include Suitcase Art at Kunsthaus Speckstrasse in Hamburg, Germany, and Write Now: Artists and Letterforms at the Chicago Cultural Center. Jackson’s work is included in the collections of the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Max Becker-Düsseldorf, Germany; Mark and Judy Bednar-Chicago; and Guido Cabib-Naples, Italy, among others. In addition to the press her work has received in Interview Magazine, Blouin Art Info, and the New York Times, she is also a regularly contributing writer to Frieze magazine.
Diane Simpson Collar (on altered table), 2014 Wood table, MDF, and enamel 34 x 25 x 12 inches
on the wall Diane Simpspn Window Dressing, 2014
Diane Simpson (b. 1935, lives and works Chicago, IL) received an MFA in 1978 and a BFA in 1971 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most recently she had solo exhibitions at Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago, IL and at JTT, New York, NY. In 2010, a thirty-year retrospective exhibition of her sculpture and drawings was held at the Chicago Cultural Center. An 88 page catalog was produced in conjunction with this exhibit. Other past solo exhibitions include Phyllis Kind Galleries, Chicago, IL and New York, NY; Dart Gallery, Chicago, IL; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; and I Space Gallery, Chicago, IL. Simpson's work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL;and the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL, among others. Simpson's grants and awards include an Arts Midwest/NEA Regional Fellowship; an Illinois Arts Council IAS-Project Grant; five Illinois Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship awards, and the Walter M. Campana and E. Garrison Prizes from the Art Institute of Chicago’s "Chicago and Vicinity" exhibitions. She has been nominated for awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundations. Diane Simpson is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago and JTT in New York.
moniquemeloche was
founded
in
October
2000
with
an
inaugural
exhibition
titled Homewrecker at Meloche’s home, and officially opened to the public in May 2001. Working with an international group of emerging artists in all media, the gallery presents conceptually challenging installations in Chicago and at art fairs internationally with an emphasis on curatorial and institutional outreach.
moniquemeloche 2154 W. Division, Chicago, IL 60622 p 773.252.0299 www.moniquemeloche.com