Delayed by a year and far overdue, the second half of No Deep Kissing, Yale School of Art’s Sculpture Group 2 graduates of 2020 Thesis show opens Monday, March 22nd at 32 Edgewood. Featuring new works and installations from Genevieve Goffman, Lauren Lee, Anna Alvina Miller, Randi Renate, David Roy, and Alex Zak, this exhibition celebrates not only the culmination of the artists’ graduate school careers, but also the continued dedication to their practices in a year of great upheaval and duress. Even in the quietest of times, graduating into the world can be a difficult and disorienting task—we often change in ways we don’t expect with people whose faces are only recently becoming familiar to us. But now, as the world slowly re-emerges from the carnage of a year isolated and fearful, we see the work still persists—though not as we may remember it. Let us begin the process of finding our communities in their wholeness once more and hold space together, even if the rule of no deep kissing remains.

writing

Dog In Training: Review by Kathryn Gruszecki

A series of drawings depicting the process of human taxidermy hang alongside an actual taxidermied fox— hollowed out, skinned, and the face no longer attached. The fur, the skin, and the face make up three objects. The skin of the fox is intricately set up to purge the tennis balls it was trained to catch. The fox, like a dog, is in the process of being domesticated.

The body of the fox sits next to its skin. It’s visibly soft fur drives the urge to pet, yet it remains a hollow, faceless, empty vessel. This empty body becomes the pictorial representation of the process of becoming an object— one envisioned by the taxidermist. The taxidermist gives the dead fox a new life without knowing any details of the one it had prior. The title of the series, Dog In Training, depicts the taxidermist as one that fills the fox up to shape it into what it desires. The fox is now a hound. She sits to be pet, fetches the ball in motion, and obeys the orders of the artist.

The fox’s face is hung on the opposing wall helplessly staring at its still, stuffed, body and flaccid skin as it takes on the form of the artist’s imaginary.

Lauren Lee’s drawings fill the wall closest to the objects. It is in this moment we meet Kevin and the artist’s narration of human taxidermy. In a series of three, Kevin’s eyes are gorily removed and replaced. Then, like the fox, his face is delicately sliced and removed. In the final step, his head is stuffed with cotton.

The relationship between the objects and the drawings is one that relates closely to being desired and desiring. The Lacanian notion of desire is always, “… the desire of the Other.” Which Lacan claims is the process of “… always asking the Other what they desire” (38, Lacan, Jacques. My Teaching; Verso Books, 2009.) The taxidermic object is emptied with all that makes it a fox or Kevin and is stuffed into becoming the object of the taxidermist’s desire.

The tension of this relationship to desire and being desired is not absent of both pleasure and pain— it is depicted in Lee’s drawings as masochistic. Kevin’s head is enclosed in a cage while the artist holds a flower to his nose offering him a treat of the flower’s smell.

Again, Kevin has hot tea poured down his mouth- symbolic of both an act of care but painful as we can imagine the heat of the tea burning the subject’s mouth.

In trying to become what the other desires we find pleasure in pleasing them but pain in the transformation. There also is pain in knowing that one could never be the perfect image in the eyes of the other— a feeling of disappointment as we always fall short— spitting up the tennis balls we were trained to catch because catch is not a game meant for a fox. Lauren Lee is both the fox and the human taxidermist, simultaneously an object of desire and one that desires.

writing

Lifelines: Anna Alvina Miller’s In the Blue (2021) by Rachel Tang

To locate ourselves and our sense of home in the expanse of the unknowable, we must learn the distances between stars, rehearse emergency procedures, and calibrate our instruments of navigation. Seldom do we allow ourselves to venture into the blue, to sit with the unknowable opacity of water. Yet so often do we ask our waters—whether they be rivers, oceans, or seas—to bear the anxieties we project upon the mysteries they embody. To live out on the water, as Anna Alvina Miller has been doing with her partner, is to become accustomed to sitting with the discomfort of these unknowns; you exist according to the whim of the elements, what weather the winds will bring in, or how the waves will roll beneath your feet.

Miller’s work, In the Blue, invites us to become familiar with the textures of not knowing. Here, her thirty-five foot home on the water is deconstructed, stripped down to the parts most essential to safety and navigation. Two twin steel bodies are wrapped with a continuous length of rope, forming a foreshortened kind of a tentacular constellation. These dual structures are held together, with some slack, by the very same ropes which constitute them. This is the moment that the celestial meets the terrestrial, the moment between that which is tangible and that which is just out of reach.

A rope, pristine and uniform in its undulations, is wrapped around one of the steel bodies. Indelibly intricate stitching is revealed upon closer inspection. On this celestial twin, the rope unfolds around a tide clock, with its verso bearing a traditional clock, gesturing towards our insistence on measuring the present, making time paradoxically slip past us in two directions. To not have a clock aboard is a cardinal sailing sin, as time spent on the land can feel dangerously different than time spent at sea, as one’s temporal sensibilities are liquidated, quickly becoming difficult to grasp.

In the presence of epistemological gaps which threaten our stability, protection and small comforts become important. Broken down to its smallest fibers, a different, dilapidated rope creates a protective wrapping around the other body, the terrestrial twin. This kind of rope, called “baggy wrinkle” is an old sailor’s process that repurposes otherwise useless materials into a layer of protection. This terrestrial body also bears a barometer and comfortmeter to measure pressure, temperature and humidity; peculiar machines regulating our proximities to the natural forces around us.

The rope that supports the tide clock on the celestial structure extends out like a lifeline to its twin. In nautical terms, a lifeline is many things: a line shot to another ship in distress, a line used to lower divers into the depths, a line that attaches a person to their vessel. The diagonal line in one’s palm, thought to indicate the length of one’s life, is another kind of lifeline, etched into our own bodies, perhaps another attempt to compress the unknown into something measurable. Here, this continuous length of rope between twin bodies loops and twists to form multiple infinity signs, a lifeline ad infinitum.

This past year, we have been plunged into the blue. For many reasons, time feels different and we feel particularly vulnerable. When we travel into the blue, we worry that there is a chance that we might become adrift or disappear completely. Here, however, Miller offers us a lifeline. In the Blue is a promise that we are still free to wander, knowing we will safely return to our vessels.

writing

text by Holly Bushman

In August 2019 David Roy took a cross-country motorcycle trip from Inglewood, CA to New Haven, CT. Road trips have a way of climbing into our minds and resurfacing in unexpected ways: we remember billboards and gas station meals, unfamiliar faces and unremarkable stretches of highway. On this particular trip, David was confronted with the realities of life in America: the ecological damage, economic depression, and enduring racism that marks so much of this country, alongside fading reminders of American exceptionalism and the manufactured symbols of past greatness, a greatness that for many Americans has never existed.

Yet David’s trip has informed his practice as a powerful means of thinking through contemporary American identity and its potential futures. The founder of BLACKNASA, a space program committed to peaceful and meaningful exploration, David builds rockets which reclaim the power of technology as a tool for good. His rocket launches are events which unite and inspire, and remind us of the incredibly human capacity for joy and wonder.

writing

On Things That Recede by Joseph Zordan

“Spring break… spring break forever…” — James Franco as Alien in Spring Breakers (2012)

Florida nights are typically associated with bright club lights flashing on the shore and young tourists screaming until dawn. A land founded on the myth of eternal light, youth, and excess for Spanish conquistadors, reiterated time and time again within popular culture, Florida remains a locus of pleasure and debauchery within the American imaginary. Within Alex Zak’s most recent installation bringing together drawing, installation, and sculpture, however, we are asked to think of a night that does not scream, but recedes quietly into the shadows instead, a soft breeze between the leaves. In the quiet of Zak’s rendered night, away from the lights and noise of urbanity, a forest stands hushed and still; a fountain runs dry, and a sign becomes illegible. In this voided landscape of the new moon, how quickly does your own hand become unfamiliar to you?

This defamiliarization—whether it be of material, myth, self, or image—is a central aspect of many of the works within the installation. Common legends of the fountain of youth among early European settlers and explorers of the tropics hover around What Spoils the Fountain, Poisons the Well. The gravitational center of Zak’s constellated installation, this work is a barren well built against a sheetrock wall incised with three windows cascading downward. Tiled with unpainted scored-sheetrock and imitation terrazzo, also made of sheetrock, on a wooden stair armature leading to the barren pool, this architectural piece seems not only drained of its water, but of the very magic and vitality it may have once contained. The sheetrock crumbles and splays outward from the piece, seemingly exhausted by the weight of history and image it was meant to carry. A material typically meant to recede behind works within art galleries, sheetrock here takes a lead role, unmistakable and unavoidable. In foregrounding sheetrock, Zak denaturalizes the material, along with the mythos it represents.. Embedded within the stairs, a rusted sword ornamented with hot pink and pearl-esque plastic bead necklaces seems to locate the wound which bled this well dry. Its form seems to place the colonial aspirations for immortality and the Edenic infinity of natural resources as an unwinnable prize, which comes at a particularly poisonous cost to Native and Indigenous inhabitants and lifeways. For the artist, it seems that colonial fantasies collapse under the weight of their imposed promises, an unsustainable system meant to crumble beneath settlers’ feet.

The moons orbiting this central work, Indiscriminate Collector and Burnt-Out Chariot, locate these colonial histories and broken vows further. The former, an assemblage of iridescent pen shell fragments hoisted on a copper frame, congeal into the image of a metal detector. A video, nestled within the work’s screen, of plant life from a relative-of-the-artist’s backyard loops back in on itself over and over again. As the wind blows and the sun shines on the recorded botany, strange, shifting, kaleidoscopic colors shimmer across the plants’ surface; the water from the surrounding area contains enough metals to be absorbed within the tissue of the plants themselves. These collisions between non-human life and the metallic—whether of the plants in the video or the composition of the metal detector itself—rehearse the hybridization for which the American tropics are well known. Within these combined forms, colonial desires and aspirations again become evident. Indiscriminate Collector’s iridescent and shining body conjures the aspirational search for wealth along the shore and tropics that gave way to many of these hybrid bodies from earliest modes of colonialism to today. Whether it be from a shipwreck, plantations, or tourists’ loose pockets, myths of abundance and economic mobility remain. Ecology, for Zak, seems to go far beyond even that which is breathing, and brings a liveliness to metals which infiltrate boundaries of the epidermis—human and plant alike.

These stories seem to reach their culmination in Burnt-Out Chariot. Carefully melted, the plastic bin and the folders within Burnt-Out Chariot seem to still be settling from their previously overheated state, a small pile of debris of mixed materials sloping from the bin. But even in its state of ruin, its copper handles gleam, polished and pristine. An amalgamated object, making the familiar strange yet again. In the charred remains of transmission, Zak seems to gesture toward the polemics of history and memory itself: What stories survive? And for whom? And perhaps more importantly: What history is destroyed? And for whom?

Yet even in the midst of ruins and collisions, violent and hot, there remains the possibility of what is to come. In the bizarre alliances between materials and images, human and non-human, living and nonliving, something else seems to be waiting in the wings. Rather than a platform at the end, the installation seems to be the stage for what is next. Within the suite of drawings, nocturnes in their own right, The Morning After reveals a golden break of dawn. The windows, when catching light just right, cast beams onto the beads which gleam just like the copper. The night, however, does not need to dissipate for us to move beyond it; Zak seems to have made his own stars, whose gleam might guide us beyond this ruin to someplace else, yet to be imagined.