“Chromophobia” at Meat Market Gallery

A Review of “Live to Tell” an exhibition featuring Lily DeSaussure and Graham Childs



By Lana Stephens

The Meat Markey gallery in Washington’s Dupont circle was busting at the seams on Friday night. The opening featured two exhibitions: “Live to Tell” by Lily DeSaussure and Graham Childs and “Naturing” by Sangbin Im and April Behnke. People navigated like rats through corridors and simulated rooms that seemed to both welcome and expel visitors.

I’m referring to an installation by DeSaussure and Childs. The white-washed interior within the gallery’s front room greets you as you enter the space. One must enter through a hanging door frame that places you in what appears to be a living room. The room is complete with crown molding and seven hanging windows, stripped bare of any curtains or blinds. The windows act as a barrier in place of actual walls from the rest of the gallery. An armature encloses the room forming a frame around invisible “open” walls. The room is decorated with household items and furniture. Dolphin figurines and frames adorn the shelves of a bookcase while a round dining room table inhabits the corner of the room. A deer head holds his perch high above, regally watching over the visitors that come and go, their skin tones and colorful jackets and scarves interrupting the stark whiteness of the room.

This is starting to sound a bit like a chapter I read from “Chromophobia,” where the author David Batchelor describes his experience of entering an entirely white home. He feels subordinate to the “aggressive” whiteness that seems insulted by his mere presence. I suppose there was a sort of aura to the installation room in the gallery, though I wish it were stronger. I felt odd being in the room, a bit out of place amongst the stark tranquility. I sucked in my breath when a gallery-goer spilled his beer on the floor of the room. His clumsiness was rendered obscene in the “pure” space.

I began coming up with stories in my head of how or why a room could end up like this. Perhaps the tenants fled, abandoning the now post-apocalyptic scene, smothered in white ash. The tea cups left on the table give it an eerie feeling, a feeling I wish was carried throughout the rest of the room. I wish there was white milk in the cups and white food on the table. I wish there were a blank newspaper folded on a chair. The white-washed plants are a nice touch however. The dolphin figurines bothered me though. There was something too generic about them. Maybe it’s because I hail from a tourist “beach” town where tacky sea life seems to invade every once respectable home. I suppose I wanted the white objects to be more personal so that the feeling of my intrusion was heightened to an uncomfortable state.



The room is not only an “environment,” it serves as an exhibition space from DeSaussure’s stitched drawings that hang, suspended in air on one side of the room. The pieces on display play a dual role; 1) decorating the domestic interior and 2) functioning as works of art that are for sale. Her work consists of multi-figural stitched compositions on paper. Lily uses embroidery floss in a painstaking process that it not only laborious, but requires quite a bit of skill, or craft. She stitches each mark, sometimes overlapping to create a more “worked,” layered surface. The compositions consist of what seems to be amiable past times between old friends and lovers. My only criticism of the three large stitched compositions is that they are not white on white. I realize white thread on white paper would be difficult to see, but the experience of being in a totally white room is also quite difficult. Call me biased, but I too, like the homeowners in Batchelor’s novel, am coming down with Chromophobia.


"Live to Tell" is on view at Meat Market Gallery until March 2nd.

Lucy Hogg The Last Pony at Meat Market Gallery

By Tim Campbell



Lucy Hogg is an artist who loves color. If you were to attend one of her lectures, she would take you through the history of her work as a painter, discuss her interest in this or that style, this or that mode of painting, how her work interacts with feminism and how it takes interest in the historicity of painting. She might close the lecture pointedly, saying that painting is dead and video and photography are its replacements. You’d be left wondering why she makes these big paintings in the first place.
Hogg answers that question in her current show at Meat Market by publicly rejecting painting as a viable medium. What Hogg’s show fails to address in any way is why painting is dead. Instead, she shows how it can be quickly overpowered. With a cool face, Hogg muscles painting out the door. The photographs exercise a technological mastery of hue and balance by showing how the same painting can be “repainted” using colorways; that is, different color filters can achieve the same effect as the painting, and they can do so instantly and in a number of ways. In the back room, video steps in, and with even less effort the color options are integrated into a time-based composition.
If Lucy Hogg thinks that this proves painting’s ineptitude, then she is missing the point. Its obvious to anyone who has ever tried to paint that the medium is not the most technologically advanced. It’s obvious to any 7 year old who goes into the National Gallery and would rather be watching TV, and its obvious to me every time I use Google or YouTube.
Ironically, the painting in the show is what ends up giving meaning to the photographs and video piece. This is not because the painting is in some way special or more important, its simply because the painting brings the content that Hogg has always been concerned with to the table. The video and photographs fail to add to or alter the content of this painting, they just show other alternatives for how it could be presented. The photographs/video are not concerned with equestrian portraits, or the history of landscape painting, or the political context in which Velazquez had to operate as a painter, but the painting is concerned with these things. The images in the photos and video could be anything- a house, a cat, or perhaps most fitting, Hogg herself.
For all of Hogg’s difficulty with what painting is, with why it exists and what should be done with it, her critique comes with just a hint of Greenberg. She has placed the medium on the table next to several others, and allowed each of them to compete as self-contained modes of visual communication...but none of them really communicate anything. Well, congratulations to video for being video, and to photography for being photography, and to painting for being painting, but if this is supposed to be some instructive lesson on which media we should privilege, then I’m bored.
Maybe Hogg is broadening her audience, or bringing a new vocabulary to her work, but that doesn’t really mean that her statements are more meaningful or important in any way. If you are going to change mediums, fine, do it. It’s exciting, so long as you are using them to make something interesting, and so long as you are using them for a reason. It’s been a long time since John Baldessari made cookies, and anybody who is interested in taking credit for painting’s burial rights should consider this.

Benjamin Jurgensen and Paul Jeffreys at Meat Market

REVIEWED BY KATE SABLE


On Sunday, the Meat Market gallery closed the show Conscious Inaction, a two-person exhibition of sculpture by Benjamin Jurgensen and photographs by Paul Jeffreys. Both men aim to examine ideas of contemporary masculinity, through themes of youth culture and materialism in Jurgensen's case, and an exploratory juxtaposition of images of strip joints and hunting trophy rooms in Jeffreys'. The Meat Market gallery can call this show another success, their exhibition design gave the works their due, with a particularly interesting parallel arrangement of Jeffreys' photographs, highlighting the comparison of the subjects, and lending to the message.

Jurgensen arranges representations of plainly painted inanimate objects made out of MDF and wood in awkward and often sexual setups, creating short narratives. The arrangements are sometimes perilous, sometimes secure, and the interaction of the objects points directly to the title of the show, Concious Inaction. The objects have been removed from their active context, in position and medium, but do not necessarily take on a new life in their discrete groupings, perhaps highlighting the similar circumstance of many people's lives. The objects seem to reach toward some meaning together, but only in a half-hearted manner, as if arranged precisely toward no potential objective. For some, that circumstance would speak volumes.

Paul Jefferey's neutral photographs, on the other hand, utilize places that seem to allude to the man's man of the rural United States. Images of an American sitting room overcrowded with a hunter's preserved trophies of game animals, isolated to a direct comparison with scenery from a over-neglected backstreet strip club point to the misguided intentions of a distinct subculture of men. It would seem that the meaning of preserving an animal for display or creating a stage and lighting to host naked women for view would be to elevate the subject, somehow enhancing them from their natural states of being. However, isolated or jammed into these unnatural spaces, both subjects are distinctly degraded, the animals by losing their beauty of life, the women by performing in much less than pristine conditions. The images lack the human denizens of the spaces detailed, allowing the viewer to enter and examine the static world presented in the first-person, benefiting in a way from the focus on inactivity.

These viewpoints on the two artists' work bring about an interesting connection, by their focus in this specific context the subjects are degraded to a point of pointlessness. With Jefferey's taxidermy animals, it is clear that people cannot enjoy inhabiting the tiny space left between the multitude of animals. The animals lose the little function left them, they fail to beautify their space, and become an impossibility of reason. The strip club images highlight the dingy and worn qualities of the objects that host the sexual encounters of the people that frequent these places. The objects fail to enhance the space or the experiences held there, but continue to exist only as a matter-of-fact. Similarly, the sculpture objects that Jurgensen creates are also pointless, stripped from their function, happy only in their coexistence with the others in their groupings. Sometimes I suppose, pointlessness does not imply meaninglessness.

C'mon c'mon

Come support our friends, writers and above all, talented artists. Geoffrey Aldridge, Cory Oberndorfer, Lily deSassure, and Graham Childs work available at Meat Markets Auction.

This Friday, 6-9 at Meat Market

Chris Williams, J.J. McCracken at Meat Market Gallery, by Brian Barr

Part One
Carniceria: Chris Williams

Meat Market Gallery is actually a pleasant surprise in the DC art scene. Upon entering the gallery, I was greeted with an overriding sensation of the pristine quality of the space. White walls, white plaster sculpture, men in white lab coats and hats just visible in the back room. It was almost eerie, yet it was just odd enough to get my attention. The main gallery in front was host to Carniceria, the exhibition of sculptures by Chris Williams.

The exhibition attempted to fuse sculpture and text with the architecture of the space in order to address the history of the building, the current use of the building as an art gallery (by commenting on the dangers of arts commercialization), and finally the building's location in the heart of a thriving gay community. The works were divided between sharp-edged, geometric shapes with text in relief on the surface, and ambiguous, biomorphic forms. The one commonality the works shared was that they were all executed in plaster and coming out of the wall. Williams attempted to seam the plaster of the walls with that of his sculpture so that in a very literally way the distinction between, the architecture of the gallery and his work was seamless.

I mentioned that the artist was not only responding to the physical space of the gallery but also the psychic space of the gallery through its past and present, and cultural surroundings. In his hard geometric forms, Williams had text in rows of relief printing (one inch high). The text was simply three appropriated and recontextualized lines repeated over and over. In responding to the history of the space as an actual meat market (the space was formerly home to a butcher shop), the line, “Living in America begins to alter ones understanding of oneself and others.” According to the gallery-issued press release, this line references, “how Latino-American labor functions and is taken advantage of in the contemporary marketplace.”

In reference to the spaces current function as an art gallery the line, “ensuring the health and stability of a network of interconnected relationships…” is used to refer to the potential manipulation of an artist's labor in the art market. The final line of text that is supposed to comment on the location of the gallery within Dupont Circle’s gay community is, “no state must accept another states definition…” (a line pulled from the Defense of Marriage Act).

I must commend Williams intention for this project, yet I must admit I found the execution lagging far behind the ambition in this case. For one thing, the printing of the text became surface decoration, being taken so far out of context as to be almost illegible. I would prefer the text's meaning be subtle and tacitly included into the work, which is how it read initially. Yet, the press release put the socio-political implications of the work's text at the forefront of the exhibition. The work really was more about not only blurring the line between art, architecture and social commentary, but eliminating that line all together. In this regard, both the content and aesthetic ambitions of the work demanded flawless execution, and here is where Williams ultimately failed. Upon even a slightly closer look, such as looking behind the piece that was in the corner, but not quite in the corner to discover the uneven surface of plaster, or almost but not quite perfect angles to where the four sides of one of the plaster diamonds meet, the realization of the executions lacking is obvious. In my mind, the success of this show hinged on all the elements becoming so fused as to not be noticed, rather than make obvious there points of intersection. I do still think the show was interesting and worth the trip to Dupont to check out for yourself, and the show's intention is to be commended on the part of Meat Market Gallery. I feel the show could have been better considered.


Part II
Stasis by J.J. Mc Cracken


The room in the far rear of Meat Market plays host to the performance, Stasis, by J.J. McCracken, which runs through February 25, with live performances every Saturday while the exhibition is open, from 4-6pm. To enter into the space one must pass through long, heavy plastics strips extending from ceiling to the floor, reminiscent of the meat freezers that no doubt once belonged to the space. Once inside I was struck by the frigid tempurature of the space, which was at least 15 degrees colder than the main exhibition space, despite the perhaps ten or more spectators also in the room with me.

The room housed a table, at which three individuals dressed in lab coats, white knit hats, protective eye goggles and plastic gloves, worked, assembly line style at constructing, packaging and displaying small vessels of clay. The first person was responsible for spinning the vessels on a motorized potters wheel, the second for vacuum seeling the freshly spun tiny vase, and the final individual was in charge of hanging the newly preserved vessel, now incapable of holding even air on the adjacent wall. This went on endlessly until the gallery closed up shop. No words were spoken by or to the three laborers, they new their tasks and they executed them with repetitive haste.

The press release claims the work investigates preservation, with that vague description we are left to ponder what “presevation” implies and what about it the artist is dealing with and trying to communicate. This peformance becomes a statement on the art of performance in some small way. The statement goes on to say McCracken is proclaiming that performance is as important as the making and preserving of art objects.

It was the juxtoposition of the title, Stasis, (which refers to inactivity, being motionless and stagnation) with the movement of the performance itself that I found most curious. This left me wondering if the artist was commenting on art and art making itself as having become stagnant; involved in an endlessly repetetive cycle of production, marketing and preservation? By bringing the act of creating and preserving to the attention of the viewer, McCracken is ultimately caught in the paradox of this manner of creative exploration. He is commenting on the system of production, and marketing of creativity but also making this exploration at a commercial gallery space, and each of his conveiniently packaged “objects” are available for purchase for the low, low price of $16.00. This way you too can own your very own (art) “object”.

It is a very interesting “exploration”, I have to admit. I recommend that all interested see it during one of the live performances, rather than seeing merely the shell of the action. This would only focus on the display and marketing aspect. It must be seen in action to fully appreciate the artists intention. For me what is so successful about the piece is that in the end, I am left to decide what I think about notions of creative production and its inevitable exploitation by market forces. McCracken is not preaching in this piece, he seems to me to be pondering right along side me.