Kim Córdova Writing - kim córdova

frieze: Nicolas Ceccaldi at House of Gaga

9/30/2016

Nicolas Ceccaldi, 'To be Titled', 2016, Courtesy of House of Gaga

The mass-produced paintings that adorn dentists’ waiting rooms and model show homes are inoffensive but, invariably, depressingly dull. The absence of any specific referents in their anodyne landscapes renders obvious their assembly-line fabrication. They call to mind modernist Hermann Broch’s definition of kitsch as the product of ‘an emergent bourgeoisie caught between contradictory values: an asceticism of work on the one hand and an exaltation of feeling on the other’.

In ‘Les Chemins de la Honte – The Path of Shame’ at House of Gaga, Nicolas Ceccaldi presents just such a series of mass-produced works – purchased from the Pier 1 Imports section of a Sears department store in Mexico City – which he has altered with paint-pen markings, paper collages, animal skulls, butterfly wings, fabric flowers and hair clips. A series of wall-mounted animal skulls has also been similarly decorated. Gone are the artist’s dystopian cyborg sculptures and participatory readymades (Wearables, 2015). Here, Ceccaldi’s gaze has shifted to what the exhibition text refers to drily as ‘flora and fauna: the two essential elements of the natural world’. The artist continues: ‘The call of the wild is depicted in this exhibition as a reactionary tendency against the metropolis, a common reaction exemplified by the development of tourism, the spiritual appeal of rural sites, and the regain of consciousness and empathy for animal life.’ The pieces Ceccaldi presents, however, make little reference to nature. Rather, they appropriate paintings of nature produced on an assembly line – likely the one in Dafen, China, which churns out an estimated 60 percent of the world’s oil paintings for display in middle-class homes and offices. Nature, here, is not a subject of representation but another effect of human consumption.

Art Review: Chelsea Culprit: Miss Universe at Yautepec

9/15/2016

Chelsea Culp, Installation Miss Universe, 2016, Yautepec

Chelsea Culprit’s Miss Universe reimagines the titular parade of competitive objectification as the psychic mise-en-scène of a strip club locker room, strewn with all the defences, reconciliations and intimacies needed to survive the pressure to perform.

In paintings and larger than life sculptures of back stage dancers in thongs and bras Culprit works to dismantle the basic-arithmetic economics of desire: more is more is more. Eschewing the soft-focus of finish-fetish she presents stubbly figures made of painted cement, high density foam, and sand with rough skin, thick calves, extra arms and platform dance shoes that while theoretically meant to elevate them, visually weigh them down.

Though the women are off-stage and indifferent to our gaze, I struggle to see them as liberated figures, even in these moments of locker-room intimacy. A sculpture of an almost faceless woman in a silver plastic dress with ‘tickle-window’ cutouts reclines, endlessly pouring herself a Red Bull through a fountain pump in the can. Titled Tired of Being Tired (all works 2016), her exhaustion defines her. A few feet away the dwarfed flame of a votive candle flickers in the Elephant Man-like hands of Her Fire, a woman frozen in the act of trying to light herself a menthol cigarette. Behind both women a painting proclaiming GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS, mimics a flashing neon sign in a window covered with tinfoil security bars suggesting a prison or a circuit. Think Peter Halley gone to the porn shop.