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Moody, trashy, this whole exhibition’s world is a fucked up kinda neo-Dada installation with a freakish video; Cobra/Expressionist-type paintings extend to wall smears and splatters and some scale-model, hapless, habitats made of ripped Styrofoam, wood and whatever, are slapped together and painted—so I decided to stay a while. There was something else there: Some strong social commentary, a real bit of reanimation and an abundance of rehashed memories that mix and meld like a Thanksgiving dinner from hell; a festive nightmare that manages to somehow come together with a sick sweetness. That’s how it goes when a show is nicely, and smartly, curated. You move from the nightmare to the magic moment through a slick orchestration of elements |
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Pia Maria Martin, Haeri Yoo and Yuh-Shioh Wong at Thomas Erben Gallery – D. Dominick Lombardi
Moody, trashy, this whole exhibition’s world is a fucked up kinda neo-Dada installation with a freakish video; Cobra/Expressionist-type paintings extend to wall smears and splatters and some scale-model, hapless, habitats made of ripped Styrofoam, wood and whatever, are slapped together and painted—so I decided to stay a while.
There was something else there: Some strong social commentary, a real bit of reanimation and an abundance of rehashed memories that mix and meld like a Thanksgiving dinner from hell; a festive nightmare that manages to somehow come together with a sick sweetness. That’s how it goes when a show is nicely, and smartly, curated. You move from the nightmare to the magic moment through a slick orchestration of elements. A crosshatch of effects, affects—infectious thoughts and judgments that flutter, confront, then coalesce.
And, speaking of stuff that creeps up—gurgling, bubbling, festering—there’s Pia Maria Martin’s stop-animation film, Marche Au Supplice, which features a severed, whole chicken head and neck, complete with feathers and eyes, that here methodically stitches back together its plucked and gutted body. This 16 mm film is comprised of 7000 individually staged and recorded, sequential images and, with the unevenness of the light and the choppiness of the movements, this work has a vintage look and feel, but maintains a highly contemporary sensibility. Pretty amazing actually.
At the end of the film, after adding feet and closing up all the gaping wounds, the fastidious chicken remounts its butchered body to take its original head position, dancing away happily ever after. Besides the obvious barbs at factory farming and meat over-consumption, there’s this tangible sense of redemption here. And the effect is long lasting, like a time-release capsule, bubbling up inside, hanging in there for a good week or so in the mind of this reviewer.
On the adjacent floors and walls stand and hang the curious paintings and sculptures of Yuh-Shioh Wong. These are the habitats: weird worlds of flash and fantasy that turn the whole concept of functional construction upside down. What I found particularly noteworthy is the play of these works off of the aforementioned video that shares this same section of the gallery. It’s that curating deal again: Thomas Erben combines the right interests and complementary aesthetics. It takes the viewer a moment to get there, but you get there—to that peculiar place that this show puts forth.
Haeri Yoo’s paintings on canvas and wall fill the other half of the gallery. Despite the physical separation of being on the opposite side of this smallish space, the show holds together as one seamless soiree. Yoo’s works harken back to her days as a child in Korea where an appreciation of nature has now become a fictitious fantasy of figures and vignettes that are as mixed up as they are magical. She works quickly, and with little or no abandon. Like her show-mates, Yoo manages to take the viewer to a previously unknown place where the moments it takes to get one’s bearings are filled with cold, hard energy.
