08/08/08
Text: Donari Braxton
To create one’s “own universe,” that platitude de profundis, means about as much to contemporary art as Technicolor does to film. It’s the aesthetic continuums laying doggo within an artist’s greater body of work—the invisible threads that tie his/her individual works together—that latterly saturate, and in some sense melanize, the way we experience the artworks themselves. To that end, what’s compelling about Dimensionals, a solo show premier by Damon Ginandes (who’s better known for his expansive Brooklyn street murals), is what’s fatidically embedded within its collective face: an unconventional, if demiurgic, approach to coherence.
Specifically, the show resonates two of the artists’ loudest qualities: First, that refreshingly, he’s brash enough to use unambiguous repetition as purposefully as chronic self-referencing. Whether a generic distinction or not, it’s an important one; a cast-bronze spider rubs us slightly different when we realize it’s of the Louise Bourgeois stemma, or likewise, an otherwise banal, horizontally-divided ellipse might abruptly euphemize the androgynous when we recognize it as one of Matthew Barney’s “field emblems,” etc. This kind of residual poetics—how acute artistic idioms tend to initially drunken, then keep us aesthetically hungover—obviously offers the benefit of stimulating internalization, but it also threatens to diffuse our natural reception to artworks. Ginandes’ conceptual forté may be in his ability to streamline this double bind. On the one hand, his artwork is almost exaggeratedly recognizable; the ‘same’ characters stalk the landscape of nearly all of his creations to date, the same colors, the same tonal vacuum. On the other hand, it’s the very repetition of these elements which, unlike a typical artistic stylemark, re-insinuates their own original, objectified banality, and therefore ultimately motivates us to more clinically interact with the art itself.
The second loudest sound? Fittingly, it’s Ginandes’ impulse to undertake the “creation of his universe” on a literal basis, rather than figurative one. Dimensionals, aptly-titled, is the non-narrative narrative of an imaginary world which since the age of 12 Ginandes has been dreaming up, and like a demigod (or a mad scientist), peopling with creatures he wishes to “get to know.” Via canvass, sculpture, murals and relief, nearly each work depicts a muted world colonized by vaguely human persona, whose somas differ only in defunct, topological terms; the difference between a man and woman is nothing but a sagging bust, and the difference between old and young is little more than a mouth too frail to open. Yet here, it’s the idea of ‘dimensions’ that’s most emphatically exploited: The acrylics on wood and canvass use a combination of relief and metal wiring—mostly to the contours of defined features like the nose, or to fingers which then appear to project from the canvass—creating a convincing 3-D trompe-l’oeil. The resulting case-in-point? Angulated figure-heads expressive of an “emotional nether-region” (if you’re thinking Egon Schiele, you’re right by transience; if you’re thinking Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux animations, you’re dead-on) sit dazed in 2-dimensions, seemingly self-conscious of their own fourth-wall breaching, and, more appropriately, of their own suddenly overexposed scruples. Ginandes achieves this affectation most successfully with his acrylics; the show’s sculptures, like a mixed-media stone-head, or a 9 ft. tall Beatle Juice-like High Chair, seemed thematically germane but constructively moot, as if an abrupt line-stroke added to an abstract for the impromptu symmetry. But the breadwinners of the show, his Esperan mural composition series and a ten-set installation of standing head-puppets called Mumblers, make proof of the artist’s capacity in situ. Far from devoid of context, his characters inhabit and inadvertently sabotage their own context-of-use, and the metaphor, though perhaps not explicit, is sharp: The world, sometimes, really does seem to exist only to borne creatures whose purpose is to interrogate it.
Ginandes’ work is up August 2nd through 30th @ ARTBREAK Gallery, 195 Grand St. Brooklyn, NY.
