Fickle Goddess, shown at Venice’s Spazio Ridotto—there are a couple days left to go see it, if you happen to be in Italy—was curated by the venerable Antonia Marsh, who found Corbet’s words (which Lalita first encountered in a book of poems and songs about costume) inspiring, especially considering Venice’s “rich history of costuming and masking.”
“[That sentence] is super mysterious,” Marsh wrote in an email. “And I think even though it was definitely interesting to us that fashion was being described as a ‘goddess,’ by taking it out it leaves space for the goddess to stand for anyone. Leaving room for multiple goddesses, this position remains open, and therefore so does the title.”
Mark and Lalita are both artists who conceive of unearthly creatures, and the exhibition mainly showcases video works redolent of their respective processes. Mark creates twisted, amusingly nightmarish sculpture and video works with a regular cast of characters, who, according to the Fickle Goddess press release, “allow the artist to explore herself as well as human nature more broadly;” last year, Lalita presented Madre: A Disruptive Environment, in which actors in elaborate costuming and distorted makeup repeated movements designed to reflect Jungian archetypes of the mother. Fickle Goddess features Warholian screen tests of Mark’s characters Tiger, Cake, and Gold-Bear, alongside a few of her characters’ prosthetics (including an image by Nick Sethi of the main figure from Mark’s horror short Know Nothing), and photographs of Madre shot by Rebekah Campbell.
As Marsh pointed out, there’s a great deal of crossover between Mark and Lalita’s respective practices, and they frequently collaborate—Mark participated in Madre, and Lalita co-starred in Know Nothing. But Marsh is more intrigued by their differences. “Carly develops characters based on what she sees on social media or what she notices around her and augments these to become caricatures that develop personalities and even lives of their own on-screen,” she wrote. “By contrast, Daniela’s monsters feel very dependent on one another. In Madre, each of her nine figures represent a different archetype of the ‘mother’ and as a result live in a kind of network with one another.”
“On a more literal level, their work differs in terms of display and audience perception,” she continued. “Daniela initiates performances and engages her viewership in this way off-screen, whereas Carly’s characters live in an IRL environment by becoming sculptures after the filming is complete. The viewer’s ongoing relationship to these characters is therefore completely different, which I think is interesting to note. Precisely how these artists take their characters offline and into our real, lived, physical experience of the world is perhaps something I’m concerned with thinking about in relation to this exhibition.”
The combination of Mark and Lalita’s work is designed to “signify ongoing inquiry into how we behave and enact learned behavioral archetypes both online and offline.” Through examining at their monsters, we make more sense of ourselves.
The current show, by artist Michala Paludan, Life Without, is an abstracted, collage contemplation of the nature of cyberspace, molecular biology, and work. The placement of the artwork among the offices and laboratories of the plant is a stroke of conceptual genius in and of itself — something akin to Michael Asher’s coy deconstructions of gallery spaces.
Paludan plays into this with a sparkling dry wit: a life-size illusionist painting sucks the viewer into a hallway of processors; jumpsuits hanging on a white grid wall could easily be mistaken for workers’ hazmat gear; a glass table with an unsigned artist fellowship contract from Artist Placement Group blurs ideas of art and reality, information and image, object and intention. Workers in lab coats become apart of the spectacle as seen through windows and doors, adding harmonic synergy to the ultimate goal of the project: to allow cross-pollination between art and science.
The best pieces depict an anonymous human form caught in various states of imagistic flux, be it amid the waves of information flowing through the very air we breathe, or the figure as metaphor for cell membrane. Art is like water: fundamental, and always trying to break through. The question becomes how best to let it in.
'Life Without' will be on view through June 3rd, 2018, at the Primer Space in Aquaporin, Nymøllevej. Collages by Susanne Ussing and Carsten Hoff
Somehow, though the sentiment seems sad, there is a softness in Malka’s approach that has steeped her show in an air of hope. Malka has managed to achieve something which many artists fumble to attempt— producing political art that avoids pushiness, and is presented from an approachable angle.
Through her triad of projects, Malka presents intimacy as investigated firstly in the form of imagery. The irony of her series of poignant photographs is that they truly speak for themselves, though translate the idea through their subtlety and secretive silence. By depicting displaced body parts and presumably “personal” ephemera, Malka mimics the mannerisms of modern socialising, in terms of what is displayed or concealed— an element which can be seen both emotionally and aesthetically in the exchange between strangers as much as that of lovers or friends.
Malka’s second series is made up of an array of t-shirts, printed with taglines the artist had seen on passersby during her international travels. Each caption came directly from clothing she’d noticed being worn in non-English-speaking countries. In the context of her exhibition, the collection exemplifies another aspect of the cultural assimilation and appropriation, caught in the cacophony of colonialism and therefore, lost in translation.
Finally, Malka interprets the interaction between individuals and personal items— specifically, focusing on strangers in New York City and their own ephemeral objects. Collecting found pieces of paper from the city’s streets, the artist has translated all that she’s accumulated over three years— receipts, religious texts, children’s drawings— and presented them on edible paper, and then printed on cakes. And this is how she takes the show full circle, concluding with this food we often connect to concepts of comfort, family, kinship— though whether eaten or left to rot, in reality these cakes are equally as ephemeral as the phrases from people’s forgotten papers.
Be sure to see the show while it is still on view, through April 18th.
