Reviews: Clay Mahn at Galerie B-312 | Steve Giasson at Laroche/Joncas | Kara Eckler at Atelier Suarez | Caroline Schub at Espace Maurice

Steve Giasson’s Andy Warhol at Laroche/Joncas

Steve Giasson paints and draws several copies of Warhol works, often filtered through the copies of those works by other artists to the point that they are more depictions of copies. As exercises in representing painting, the works at Laroche/Joncas are exercises in intimacy and affection that are very different from the wrapped works of Tammi Campbell’s On View shown at Blouin|Division recently. Here, the show becomes a demonstration of touching through the reproduction of the image, given new mediation, and reconstituted. Generally of a different scale than the first and its copies, these re-imaginings are not simply invitations to a kind of mental comparison, itself perhaps rife with a kind of nostalgia.

The framing justification claims “[h]is committed and tongue-in-cheek practice is based on pre-existing artworks or historical or daily fragments, which he appropriates in different ways, in order to undermine romantic notions of authenticity and originality and demystify the creative process and the figure of the artist.” Yet, this is the opposite of what he has put on display, which is entirely romantic and mystifying precisely because the act of appropriation as “appropriation” and the historicization of it creates a mystical aura around the absent originals, casts Giasson in the role of both the master of the historical process and its reproducer, and stresses his function as the artist-of-art. 

This is further a mystification because casting this performative act in terms of “undermining” when it is the conformity to a model of art that has been institutionalized for more than half a century is nonsense. If this were the goal, he might have been better off appropriating the work of Lori Blondeau or Eddy Firmin, which would have at least made the gesture significantly more complicated (though certainly less marketable). If Warhol’s art was, as some have suggested, about the death of affect and that it radically undermined craft and the notion of originality, these strategies are precisely what Giasson’s work undermines through its sentimentalization. What it achieves, interestingly, is a kind of ultra-kitschification.

Kara Eckler What for My Maddened Heart I Most Was Longing at Atelier Suarez

Kara Eckler is displaying a range of paintings made over the past several years. Autobiographical and erotic in content, they depict her and various lovers and friends posed in embraces or moments of sensual anticipation. The accompanying text terms them “pornography” and stresses these obvious content matters with less evident ones: references to sex magic, tantra, and witchcraft, and the role media in seeing, this symbolized by “[h]ints of digital effects or glitches.”

The paintings themselves tend to be overshadowed by the way they have been displayed. Exhibition and studio space become identical and the dingy, darkly painted, and dimly lit space of the show theatricalizes its intimacy. There are candles on the floor, old wine bottles, flower petals, and bits of lingerie. 1980s soap opera sex minus the bubble bath. 

 

There is something basically off to the magical/spiritual aspect in the paintings themselves, which vary significantly in quality and tend to stress this aspect in terms of content rather than pictorial logic. They have all been conducted in a fairly loose expressionist style with simplified body parts, and exaggerated heads that suggest folkloric sculpture as much as renderings of the familiar. Paint is often built up, but in a way that is stodgy or unlyrical, where the texture adds little to the variations of light in the image. The broadness of the brush strokes and the muddling of dark colours (the traditional reds and blacks associated with eroticism with the occasional garish pink) suggest a kind of groping lack of recollection that mutes any sensuality, subordinating it to a bleary image that does not register as either particular or iconic.

By far the most successful works are the smaller ones, which were located primarily on a table at the back. Here, the figure tends to be simplified to the point of becoming iconic, registering far more convincingly as re-renderings of already captured images. They do not have the romanticizing aspects of the other works and are blunter, not seemingly compelled to overcompensate for their lack of sensuality. In this move toward a more clearly abstracted and stereotyped form, they come closer to some of the basics of the tantric art that she alludes to as a primary influence.

Clay Mahn’s Air Condenser at Galerie B-312

Surprisingly, Clay Mahn’s paintings at B-312 actually get closer to this tantric comicism. 

Stripped to a minimum of lines, tones, and patterns, the surfaces of his paintings are simultaneously animated by a sense of being actively employed objects in the world (they seem like something discarded and stacked in someone’s garage after they renovated an old house) and distilled cosmograms that play on basic modes of retinal activation that can have a micro-hallucinatory power.

Caroline Schub’s STERILE at Espace Maurice

The inventory of Caroline Schub’s show at Espace Maurice includes two photos on silk, a poem on the wall, a transparent photo box on the floor hooked up to medical equipment, bones cast in plaster with synthetic “flesh,” a needle dripping “blood” in a bowl, and a chest cast wrapped to a pillow slumped against the wall. The overall sense of the show is mildly elegant decontamination, something that was unintentionally accentuated by the strong cleaning solution used in the small space of the gallery/loft. It is an almost elegant kind of decontamination.

In terms of content, the show foregrounds the artist’s autoerotic relationship, using her body as a prop in its photos or a model for casting into some of its sculptural aspects. The photos, pale and flat, display her nude body in her living space surrounded by the various medical devices she uses in her daily life. In one, with her legs spread and some shellfish between her legs, she looks toward the camera, and in the other she operates more like an architectural feature framed by house greens, the black line of her shutter release cable running like a catheter cord out of frame.

If there is a certain grimy quality to Eckler’s dramatic work, in Schub it is cool, purified, and tactile in a doctor’s office way. As filled as it is with the blunted visceral ambience of a low-budget body horror movie and its rote taste for the “abject” in the form of the therapeutically redeemed, this is all rather flat in the work, if not in the framing. The accompanying text by Alegria Gobeil, built around responses to Schub’s poetry, is packed with overused MFA theory class tropes (trauma, negotiation, consent, seduction) and both tend toward a kind of performative “obscenity” that comes off like badly aped Kathy Acker if it was afflicted with “sincerity.” This subjectification by cliché nearly sedates the alluring but minimal vitality of the work.