Alphonse Berber Gallery is pleased to present Works that Disturb the Moonlight, an exhibition of eight contemporary artists that seeks to enrich and explode preconceived ideas about the grotesque and sublime. Featuring work from Angie Crabtree, Julia Davis, Igor Josifov, Joshua Martinez, Annie McKnight, Maja Ruznic, Kadet Kuhne and Kim Ye, this exhibition invites the viewer to encounter the aestheticized human body in both extremes of its cultural perception.
Kim Ye's living sculptures connect artist and model, work and world in a collaborative act of animation. Crafted of silk, nylon, latex, wire and wood, Ye's costume-like constructions appear in two incarnations during the exhibition. At the opening reception, live models step into the sculptures and confront spectators as artifacts from a post-human game of Pygmalion and Galatea. Afterward, like so many snake-skins, the works are displayed without their human centers - a metamorphosis that leaves them "unpeopled" and alterior. Like Yves Klein's anthropometries or the plaster ghosts of Pompeii's last inhabitants, Ye's constructions effect an anthropomorphic apophasis; they invoke the human body only to affirm its impermanence.
Sundance Film Festival describes Kadet Kuhne's video Infinite Delay as "A restrained subject surrender[ing] to a sublime state of waiting in a mysterious underwater world." In Infinite Delay the sensing body surrenders itself, floating endlessly in electric blue water while enclosed in coiled tubes and webbing. Through the mediating function of consciousness and embodiment, all questions of identity and placement are dissolved into a blurring of lines between the inner and outer world, self and other, and past and present.
Blending representation and abstraction with modernistic ambidexterity, Maja Ruznic's paintings endow both figurative and non-figurative elements with the energy and pathos of a living being. The child-like personas appearing in her work, often faceless or otherwise incomplete, are formed from the same grasping swaths of paint as the compositions they inhabit. It's as though these figures distill an already-immanent trauma; they are isolated from the surrounding composition but belong to the same palette, are rendered in the same style. Ruznic seems to imply that no meaningful distinction exists between what we seclude as grotesque and the world from which we seclude it.
In the work of Igor Josifov (courtesy of Toomey Tourell Fine Art), an analogous collapsing of borders occurs between artist and form; after several years working in a range of media, Josifov has chosen his own body as primary and essential medium. Josifov casts himself as a signifying body in a field of social semiotics, and uses performance and visual representation to explore psychoanalytic themes such as identity, death, loss, and the status of the ego in contemporary society.
Annie McKnight interrogates another side of this equation in her striking mixed-media pieces. Critiquing the collusive nature of violence, death and decoration in a market-based system of aesthetics, McKnight crafts fanciful jewelry from the preserved bodies of mice, literalizing the metaphor of the capitalist state as parasite - while creating curious objects of disquieting beauty.
After the female nude, Jesus Christ's crucifixion is perhaps the most reverent subject in visual art - the languid Galilean forgiving the world while bearing its suffering is an archetype for aestheticized death. Angie Crabtree updates this icon in her monumental gouache and gold-leaf "Crucified in Comfort." Christ, wearing nothing but a halo and gold-toe tube socks, extends across a bed formed from cruciform sections of purple paper. His eyes greet the viewer reluctantly from a pose of voluptuous ease. Looking into this cryptic composition, one recalls modernist portraits of youthful prostitutes, bearing the sins of the moral world. We find our conception of the monstrous and sacred provoked again in Crabtree's newest works, a series of kaleidoscopic floral collages in which conjoined infants peek out from the leaves of brightly-colored carnivorous plants, seducing the viewer into encountering mutations such as she might otherwise turn away from in horror. That one finds these uncommon infants charming in this context should be no surprise, given Crabtree's stated goal "to give my viewers a sense of productive bewilderment - and, ultimately, to enact an aesthetic renovation of the world as it actually is."
The photographs of Julia Davis and Joshua Martinez complete the exhibition. Davis's work confronts death and crisis with a photojournalist's candor and a painter's eye for color and composition. Joshua Martinez's projections collapse time and space into a dreamy dance of light, shadow and color. As if given half the story, we seek to regain the other, understanding little but the urgency with which we must act.
Whether we shrink from it or seek it out, the grotesque is planted firmly in our visual imaginations. The same fascination that draws audiences to horror films and inspires motorists to gaze enraptured at the scenes of accidents is mobilized by the works featured in Works that Disturb the Moonlight. The works assembled here represent eight young artists' exploration of the aesthetics surrounding what shocks, horrifies, and entrances us.
-Steven Lance