Spin Cycle
Kim Bockus
It’s not often you can walk into an art gallery and feel like you’ve accidentally stumbled into a laundromat, but Kaz Oshiro’s third solo exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery is just such an experience. The gallery is dotted with appliances normally found in one’s neighborhood coin-op–washing machines and storage cupboards stand with an air of self-containment in spaces more often reserved for expressions of the deeper meaning of life. In a far corner is Kitchen Project, a phalanx of white cabinetry approximating a full-scale kitchen, which was shown in the Hammer Museum’s "Thing" exhibition this year and the Pomona College Museum of Art "Project Series 27." According to the artist, the current show deals in part with the issue of "white cubes inside the white cube." Made of what appears to be industrial enamel and melamine, the work reflects its host environment with a shared geometry and artificiality. A row of washing machines conspiratorially positioned several feet away from the wall reveals that Oshiro’s sculptures are actually constructed of meticulously prepared and painted canvas, and awareness of the enormity of the artifice unfolds with a closer look at the detailed vérité, sleek surfaces and miles of hand-painted faux-veneer edging. Yet, as clones of the mundane and commonplace, the work plays just as strongly against the gallery space’s elevating, dissociative tendencies, generating an undercurrent of slightly grubby subversion. Where there are washing machines and kitchens, there’s always dirty laundry and garbage.
Oshiro’s latest pieces, the washing machines and stacking washer/dryer units, are significantly more realistic than Kitchen Project, whose sink and stove hood sprout none of the faucets, handles or buttons needed for actual operation. Although still unplumbed and unplugged, the new work is all about the minutiae of simulation, panels of instrumentation articulated with tiny brand name logos and bondo knobs. Unlike the pared-down kitchen, it evinces little interest in the formal inquiries of minimalism (no economies of form or exaggerated scale) and is pulled down from other potentially iconic pedestals by systemic signs of everyday use. A trompe l’oeil virtuoso, Oshiro humanizes his sculptures with a variety of fabricated blemishes–chipped corners, drips and stains, paw prints, fingerprints, duct-taped doors and ubiquitous rock band stickers. The imperfection acts as a lock on humdrum reality and distinguishes the work from Warhol’s idealized reproductions. This oeuvre is also a step removed from last year’s guitar amp stacks and fast food artifacts with their accessible retro/pop appeal. Its distilled simplicity is all but devoid of easy allusive hooks.
The revelation of the artist’s construction techniques does not detract from the work’s asceticism; if Hollywood is lurking in the background, it’s as well-camouflaged as the artist’s hand, but surfaces as a voice in the debate over what these domestic set pieces are about. By stripping away many of the other art identifiers, attention is drawn to the artist’s (almost) invisible volitional choices and craft. Even the exhibition title–"Drone"–invokes a monotonous semi-inaudible soundtrack. In a phenomenological sense, these are prima facie objects whose meaning is conferred through a kind of reverse entropy peculiar to the domain of art–objects accrue meaning during metamorphosis from original to copy. This process illuminates Oshiro’s work in an objective and detached way, playing against the subjective implications of these workaday consumer goods. The tension poses questions–what kind of litany of the machine does the murmurous humming of our washing machines and dryers suggest? A connection to the relationship between work and mechanization is implied, after all, the exhibition is named "Drone" and these are laborsaving devices. If work and labor are key concepts, then play and leisure must be as well. The industrial revolution polarized work and play on a conceptual level but experientially they remain part of a single continuum, enhancing each other’s characteristics and value by contrast. So the sculpture’s raison d’être feeds ouroboros-like upon itself as the artist’s idiosyncratic vision acts as a foil to the "assembly line" experiences of the ascendant culture and its collectively-driven ethos.
