Artillery Magazine

Category: *JULY-AUG 2022

  • POEMS
    “shift work” by Evan Evans; “Enduring Romance” by John Tottenham

    shift work 

    twin heads pillow 

    moments away 

    only seats left in the front

    the forgiving distortion

    the forgetting of plot

    so grateful

    that the light should bow

    to take the shape of your mouth

    a movie where she’s

    so tired

    from watching him

    sleep

    all day

    —Evan Evans

     

    Enduring Romance

    There was a time when you were charmed

    by my lunging, and when I found your ignorance 

    more endearing. But that was long ago, 

    when love was new and our every precious moment 

    felt like sunlight glittering upon the edge 

    of a gently breaking wave. Now closeness 

    means chaos, and every dreaded moment 

    brings me closer to my grave.

    Where does all this clumsy thrusting end?

    Half-mad, greedily sucking on the
    desecrated manhood 

    of the absentee father; desire meets boredom halfway 

    in a stalemate of discontent, a deep and selfish love 

    that can only thrive in a moist environment.

    —John Tottenham

  • COMICS William Blake

    COMICS
    William Blake

  • 59th International Venice Biennale Milk of Dreams

    59th International Venice Biennale
    Milk of Dreams

    Figuratively speaking, this year’s Venice Biennale is a “Brick House;” a metaphor for what creative women are capable of achieving when given the opportunity. Cecilia Alemani, the first Italian female curator since the inaugural Biennale in 1895, has included a majority of works by women and gender-nonconforming artists. Gratzie! “Milk of Dreams,” a provocation borrowed from the book by surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, symbolizes the role imagination can play in addressing humanity’s fate. The first Black woman to represent the US Pavilion, Simone Leigh, from Chicago, wins the top Biennale prize for her imposing bronze sculpture, Brick House. A female head sits atop a wide-skirted Mousgoum dwelling design; at 16-feet-high, the powerhouse archetype speaks to the Strong Black Woman schema.

    Colonial oppression and its impacts on Blacks and Indigenous peoples has a violent cultural and ecological legacy. In response, the Nordic Pavilion became The Sámi Pavilion, featuring work by Indigenous artists. Standing across from the closed Russia Pavilion in the Giardini, with Italian Polizia standing guard, Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara hung sculptures of pendulous preserved reindeer calves inside dried tundra plants, and dried inflated stomachs suspended by sinew; an extreme aesthetic for the art world, perhaps, though the Sápmi region covers the far northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Adjacent is a multi-panel mural by Anders Sunna that narrates his family’s decades-long struggle to maintain their status as forest reindeer herders. Choreographed performances at the opening in April, titled Matriarchy, by theatre director and Sámi land guardian Paulina Feodorff, involved a promenade of silent characters miming the need for listening to non-humans. Seated on tree stumps, visitors wearing headphones watched a two-channel video and listened to Sámi Elders speak of having their lands taken away, similar to the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. The Sámi’s way of life, centered on their relationship with reindeer, is severely threatened because of colonial extractivism and climate change. This melancholic nature-based installation seeks to illustrate an eco-consciousness, to communicate Sámi traditional knowledge. 

    Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol at the Chile Pavilion, Arsenale, Venice, Italy. Photo by Patricia Watts

    To enter the Chile Pavilion at the Arsenale can take a while; the immersive multimedia installation Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, can allow only a few people every 15 minutes. Envisioned by curator Camila Marambio as a collaborative project including artists, scientists and traditional knowledge, the title translates as “heart of the peatlands” in the language of the Indigenous Selk’nam people of Toerra del Fuego. Pavilion attendants share fragrance samples of peat moss (Sphagnum) with visitors, while waiting in line. A Selk’nam guide, completely silent, leads visitors up a ramp, over an experimental growing field, and into a circular multimedia platform. The room darkens and vivid projections appear as participants drop deep, virtually, down into a bog. Not exactly VR, though the sound effects create a sensation of falling inside the earth. The guide then returns the group back down the ramp where we learn how growing peat in labs can avoid the destruction of natural peatlands used for fuel and growing food. In response to the climate crisis, the installation presents an intriguing path forward. Peatlands are a highly efficient carbon sink and extremely vulnerable; conservation is imperative. An immersive installation with a provocative proposition, though no artist is officially named—the focus is exclusively on Peat.

    Additional pavilions not to be missed in the Giardini include Brazil, where Alagoan artist Jonathas de Andrade has you enter his sensorial installation through a large sculptural ear, à la science fair. Titled With the Heart Coming Out of the Mouth, the human body is experienced in parts as emotionally charged terrain. At the Poland Pavilion, Re-enchanting the World by Roma artist Malgorzata Mirga-Tas, a luscious 360-degree floor-to-ceiling textile mural or “picture place,” captures the rich culture of itinerate life. A collateral exhibition, Ocean! What if no change is your desperate mission? by South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape, includes a three-channel video and sound installation of moving water taken in the Solomon Islands, a mediation with clapping sounds presented at the dramatic Iglesia di San Lorenzo. One outlier, not officially included in the Biennale, is Planet B: Climate Change & the New Sublime at Palazzo Bollani, an exhibition in three acts developed by French curatorial cooperative, Radicants, including Nicolas Bourriaud. They propose that our relationship with Earth is transforming through the horrors of extreme climate events, and that the artist’s gaze, the sublime, has been altered. Fortunately, there appears to be an eco-consciousness and some simple solutions to engage with at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale. 

  • CODE ORANGE July-August Winner & Finalist

    CODE ORANGE
    July-August Winner & Finalist

    Congratulations to our winner Maureen Bond and our finalists, Maureen’s photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the July/August 2022 online edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our September/October 2022 online-only photography column Code Orange.

     

    CODE ORANGE is a web-based photography column and opportunity to have your work published in the magazine, curated by LA artist and photographer Laura London. Chosen entries will be published online in Artillery and finalists will appear online. CODE ORANGE is a documentary photography project and outlet for artists to express how they feel about the current state of the world.

    Tumultuous times like ours have historically produced some of the most interesting, captivating, and timeless art; we hope to find and share similar works today. Images submitted should capture how our country and the world are affected by political, environmental change, social, personal, universal, identity issues. Photographs can be produced using a film or digital camera or smartphone. Black-and-white and or color images are accepted.

    Ten photos are selected by London, one winner and nine finalists. The winner will receive a one-year subscription to Artillery. Their photo will appear on our homepage website for two months and winner and finalists will appear in our weekly Gallery Rounds newsletter, along with our Instagram post.

    Good luck and we look forward to seeing your photographic submission!

    DEADLINE for our September/October issue: September 1, 2022

    Specifications for photo submissions:
    • Only one photo per person
    • FOR WEB: 72 dpi; 600 pixels wide. (hang onto your original large file in case you are selected for publication)
    • Include: Artist Name, Title, Date, Place, and Medium (in that specific order)
    • Email your photograph entry to lauralondon@artillerymag.com

     

     

  • Takashi Murakami The Broad

    Takashi Murakami
    The Broad

    Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is known globally for his colorful, smiling flowers, anime-inspired paintings and sculptures, and collaborations in fashion and music. His new exhibition, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, presents an intimate but powerful display of 18 of the artist’s sculptures and paintings. Featuring imagery born of traditional Buddhist and Daoist philosophy and his own imagination, the exhibition displays the artist’s perceptive ability to tap into the suffering of humanity, explore it in vibrant colors and intricate detail, and offer a glimmer of hope.

    Alongside several works from the Broad Collection, including the 1999 sculpture DOB in the Strange Forest (Blue DOB), the exhibition also features loans, new work and Augmented Reality (AR) elements that emphasize a more spiritual and healing aspect of Murakami’s creativity. The Broad’s 82-feet-wide painting In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2014)—created in response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in 2011—contains not only devastating tidal waves and piles of skulls, but also Daoist Immortals and mythological creatures, traditional East Asian symbols of hope and healing. On the opposite wall, the 32-feet-wide painting 100 Arhats (2013), on loan from the Maurice and Paul Marciano Art Foundation, depicts Buddhist arhats (disciples who have achieved nirvana). Depictions of these holy men have long illustrated the saving powers of the Buddha’s teachings, particularly following major disasters. Shortly after the 2011 disaster, Murakami began painting arhats, depicting them as grotesque, often comical figures and arranging them almost like pillars, supporting a spiritual ceiling. In both monumental yet intensely detailed works, Murakami mines Japan’s cultural and spiritual heritage to find solace at a time of great pain.

    Installation view of “Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow” at The Broad, Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com

    He also summons some of Japan’s myriad native gods, or kami (Shinto deities), in the AR element of the exhibition. Visitors may use their Instagram accounts and QR codes on the gallery floor to view kami in the gallery via their phone screens and share pictures of them on social media. Although all spiritual help is surely welcome these days, by trying to access these AR kami, visitors may feel they have interrupted their intimate experience with Murakami’s paintings to play Pokémon Go! 

    However, one work that does augment reality in a refreshing, reassuring way is the artist’s brand-new painting Unfamiliar People (2022). Here, four large figures stand against a pink ground, their faces grotesquely distorted. Apparently, during the pandemic, many people who Murakami had previously seen as reasonable and kind seemed to change and become aggressively anti-science, and this frightened him. “I sensed that in times of emergency everything about people could change, and I wanted to give form to this feeling.” By giving form to feelings and fears in his intricately detailed and often deeply spiritual art, Murakami reminds us that art can help both makers and viewers begin the healing process. 

  • Roy Dowell The Landing

    Roy Dowell
    The Landing

    Roy Dowell’s acrylic paintings are abstractions filled with interlocking and overlapping shapes of differing opacities. Though created from the depths of his imagination, Dowell’s many works reference textile designs, floral patterns, Tantric diagrams and mandalas, cosmological maps, illuminated manuscripts, as well as early 20th-century abstractions by painters such as Hilma af Klint and Sonia Delaunay. Identified only by number (in an untitled exhibition), these untitled paintings invite viewers to free associate and extrapolate, to make sense of the shapes and patterns. The chief peculiarity of Dowell’s paintings is that the compositions, while based on geometric patterns, are willfully asymmetrical, creating a sense of unbalance through misaligned layers with unexpected elements, cloaking and intersecting with those below.

    The artist’s rejection of titles demands that the viewer excavate the meaning, if any, from the artist’s imagery, and that in deciphering these works there can be no wrong answers. His untitled #1166(2020) is, like most of his works, formally similar yet stylistically divergent from the others; a semi-transparent circle floats towards a darkly opaque ground, while thin black lines feather out from its center, suggesting rotation. Below are bright red horizontal and vertical bands layered with delicate designs reminiscent of Spirograph drawings, a combination hinting at planetary movements through the night sky. 

    Roy Dowell, untitled #1159, 2022. Courtesy of Evan Bedford

    Continuing the celestial references is untitled #1179 (2022), a painting featuring circular white saw-blade shapes with black dotted centers. Varicolored concentric rings hover above a red and green patterned background. They appear set in motion, these saw-blades, spinning on their axes, as if ready for takeoff toward an unknown destination, far from the abstracted landscape below.

    The artist allows the viewer the pleasure of free association—no arrangement of shapes is so concrete as to be entirely decipherable. Maybe the off-white “X” that spans from the top to the bottom of untitled #1159 (2021) is a harlequin figure, abstracted and headless, whose arms and legs are peppered with large black dots. Behind this striking and dominant form is a lush combination of painted shapes, triangles and rectangles of differing transparencies that contrast with areas of stippled dots reminiscent of the harlequin’s diamond-patterned costume. Personification is not the norm in Dowell’s work, and in most of his paintings he explores the dynamics of shape and what a combination of shapes can come to signify, be it a planet, a target, a medallion or a bouquet of fictitious flowers.

    The deeper and longer one investigates Dowell’s paintings, the more layers are revealed. Each work is a complex amalgam of organic and geometric shapes that manage to coexist in kaleidoscopic disharmony. The pieces have their own strange and private logic: they are both loose and tight, precise and unsettled, a bit off balance but skewed with symmetry. Across the 22 works, Dowell’s idiosyncratic patterns and methods of mark-making become a language that communicates the nuances and joys of abstraction.

  • Jovencio de la Paz Chris Sharp Gallery

    Jovencio de la Paz
    Chris Sharp Gallery

    The work of Jovencio de la Paz exists between the ideal and abstract and what the press release referred to as the “fallibility of physical space.”I don’t think of “physical space” as a “fallible” domain, nor are digitally constructed spaces necessarily ideal. Yet being surrounded by the weavings in this show was to be palpably aware of that sense of suspension between the abstract or constructed ideal and the perceptual and physical fallibilities of their intersection, as well as by some of the textural, serial and aleatory tropes of 20th and 21st century art. The artist uses the Jacquard loom like a “prepared” color organ, as if Jacquard and computerized elements are already a standard loom’s “preparation.” De la Paz has complicated composition and construction with digital editing and specialized software elements, applied both remotely and manually.

    The warped grid hangings (executed in part with software co-designed with engineer Michael Mack and based upon Barracelli’s “Bio Numeric Organism” software) at first suggested weavings inspired by Uzbek or Tajik traditions, showing an electrifying vibrancy. Warped Grid (1.0) (all works 2022 unless otherwise indicated), with its protuberant gold-yellow thread in staggered ranks against the white warp of the weave, seemed to glow from the rear wall of the gallery, as if absorbing then throwing the available light back into the room.

    Jovencio de la Paz, 10 Failed Circles, 2021. Handwoven, Jacquard textile and cotton, 70 x 70 x 1.5 in (177.8 x 177.8 x 3.81 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp gallery.

    But Warped Grid (1.1) with its pale pink, slate gray and lozenged surface against alternating bars of pink and dove gray, drew me from its outward effervescence into the depths of its chambers like hollowed jewels—its jacquard-woven feints, wefts of pink and slate threads moving into whorls and caverns deflected from its loose, eccentric butterfly waffling. Yet if Warped Grid (1.0)‘lit’ the gallery,The Light of Kabir, in its morphing tessellation and richly variegated textures in indigo, red-orange, and slate gray, seemed the most fully realized expression of the “complex space of potential” the artist intends as a reflection of their non-binary identity. The “light” here is in the weaving—red-orange horizontals, woven white lozenges and raised indigo blues create a textural dissonance yet are harmonized into the torquing, spiraling movement of the weaving.

    The “warp” is literally in the weft in 10 Failed Circles (2021).Circles round an “empty” center in primary and gray, like the Albers Homage to the Square, but here De la Paz has used them as a foundation for his more complex and ambiguous spatial and chromatic constructions.

    The skewed execution of the “bent” pyramids (inspired by Pharaoh Sneferu’s Bent Pyramid of Dahshur) magnifies their success. Bent Pyramid (1.1) renders them as ghostly sailboats (with creamy whites as “sails”) dissolving into the lower register depths as if prismatic reflections. An Ocean for Eloise (2021), evokes something of both the Bauhaus and De Stijl, becoming a Feininger-esque iceberg nestling triangular configurations of checkerboard squares in slate, indigo, and pale blue—an appropriately elegiac poem for the failing grid we’ve made of the planet.

  • Known & Understood Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

    Known & Understood
    Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College

    In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (2012) bell hooks states, “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” Such words were actualized in “Known & Understood: Selections from the Permanent Collection” on display at the new Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. For example, Kiki Smith’s Hello, Hello (2000) suggests themes of harmony and companionship between humankind and animals. By using ink on Nepal paper, the artist meticulously renders with sensitive line a woman reaching out and touching a wolf. Printed separately and then joined together in collage-style demonstrates a conscious decision of contrasting textures. Both canine and woman make peaceful eye contact with one another in proximity. The human feminine greets the unflinching lupine with its welcoming expression. It is a fitting title because a “hello” sends a confirming message of acceptance, validation and recognition rather than a disconfirming pronouncement of judgment and marginalization. Smith’s work speaks to a society that is consumed by cancel-culture tendencies that are rooted in ignorance and breed misunderstanding. 

    Similarly showcasing drawing skill is the woodcut by Hans (The Elder), Burgkmair, Natives with Camel and Elephant (1508). Printmaking demands proficiency in interpreting what is seen; this work however reveals the perspective about a people. Partially clothed figures holding spears and standing near or sitting on a camel and elephant reveals that an outsider’s lens is limited by aesthetic vocabulary rooted in exoticism and othering.  

    Hans (The Elder) Burgkmair, Natives with Camel and Elephant, 1508. Woodcut on paper. 10 1/2 x 13 7/8 in. (26.67 x 35.24 cm). Pomona College Collection.

    There is also Patrick Nagatani’s From Ryoichi Excavations: Video Site Documentation: BMW Burial Site near Crow Agency, Montana USA (1985). In a series of chromogenic contact prints on paper, the artist crafts a narrative of Ryoichi, a Japanese archeologist and team who search for over 16 years—with only unreliable maps as a guide—for various cars buried at historic sites. Manipulating the power of storytelling through photography these works suggest what communication theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, “The medium is the message”; the photographic documentation makes this creative hoax appear as truth. 

    Finally, W.W.J.D. (2017) by Genevieve Gaignard, abbreviated for What Would Jesus Do, this assemblage of found objects with Black and white representations of Jesus Christ on vintage wallpaper speaks to the intersection of culture, politics and religion. Carefully placed as if floating on clouds, the white representation of the Christ wearing a pinned red button that says Single looks upward to the Black representation of the same Redeemer wearing a button that says Very Black. On top of the work is a white angelic child-like figurine. At the very center, almost compositionally connecting both Jesus images, is the small, segregation signifying artifact regarding who gets to drink at the water fountain.

    This work is painfully apt considering recent revelations that for over 20 years, the Southern Baptist Convention has suppressed information regarding sexual misconduct within its clergy. Its report reveals not only sexual abuse but that leaders rejected reform and dissuaded victims from coming forward. W.W.J.D. indeed.   

  • Amelia Carley Otra Vox

    Amelia Carley
    Otra Vox

    There are few forces in the world as powerful as memory. Reconjuring the fleeting scents of former lovers and the chattering sounds of childhood, memory evinces that life is composed of so much more than the here and now; it summons impressions that both soothe the spirit and pierce the heart. Today, as the stark consequences of faulty collective memory abound, it is worth considering the value of remembering the truth, and—perhaps more pressingly to ask—what sustains the investment in remembering a lie?

    In her latest series “Thinking About Forgetting,” Amelia Carley breathes new life into these universal questions, granting them space to expand, contract, and reveal. Inspired by the artist’s upbringing in Colorado’s desert, the exhibition presents a cacophony of eerily bright forms that feel profoundly chimeric in nature. Through these bizarrely constructed worlds, Carley highlights how her seemingly pure experiences with nature are inseparable from systems of violent extraction.

    Amelia Carley, Installation view, 2022. Courtesy Otra Vox Gallery

    The artist begins her process by gathering debris from the shores of Brooklyn’s Glass Bottle Beach, a location now notorious for its densely packed wreckage. From the collected waste of eroded sea glass, she constructs crystalline models that are then rendered in otherworldly chroma on canvas. The result is a montage of glaringly artificial environments that illustrate Earth’s increasingly transient landscapes and explore fraught relations to the natural world. Within the artificial terrain of Carley’s imagination, mounds of waste glisten with beguiling charm. In Between Deep Cuts (Glass Bottle Beach) (2021) electric hues delight the senses. Layered oil paints stand in for layers of capricious realities, and contemporaneous splashes of day and night blur the lines between realism and reverie. The enormous gem in Lost Layers (Glass Bottle Beach) (2022) sits regally up front with a mountain of waste as its background. Caught Between (Glass Bottle Beach) (2022) stands out as an emblem of the installation’s ethos, its otherworldly compositions of light and shadow sparking both intrigue and discomfort. And just below the surface of this arresting aesthetic, a sobering dissonance can be felt whispering: how does one reconcile beauty so fundamentally intertwined with tragedy?

    Within the context of late capitalism (and the manifold crises it has produced) “Thinking About Forgetting” is a timely reminder to interrogate our affective attachments to fabricated realities. It invites viewers to truly reconsider how their childhoods felt and tasted, the genuine histories of the nations to which they pledge allegiance, the toxic consumption fueling the planet’s demise, and the tragic fact that everyone already knew. Though generous with its lessons, “Thinking About Forgetting” is impactful precisely because it refuses didactic self-righteousness, and instead offers a subtler provocation—to question the authenticity of treasured illusions.

  • Alison O’Daniel Commonwealth & Council

    Alison O’Daniel
    Commonwealth & Council

    Working in a continuous exegesis of an overarching project, pursuing branching pathways to their conclusions then returning to the center and setting off again, Alison O’Daniel transforms elusive ideas and ambiguous experiences into concrete objects—still and moving images, time-and sound-based installations, and discursive narratives of extreme specificity. In recent years, that hub has been her feature film The Tuba Thieves—an interpretive documentary using conceptual and somatic strategies to tell the story of a bizarre string of music room robberies at a public school. 

    At the core of O’Daniel’s practice is her deeply considered status as a Deaf/Hard of Hearing person and the unique perspective on the world which that affords. Her expansive work touches on musicality, politics, civil engineering, physics, anatomy, science, language and landscape. In The Ownership of Onomatopoeia, the vector she revisits is a scene in which the character Awet recalls being so shaken by the explosion of a sonic boom that he badly cut his hand on a saw blade. But the show moves beyond its nested premises into a macro view of how social, economic and environmental structures coalesce to exclude Deaf experience. Along the way, the scene’s imagery and dialog generate materially and optically charged mixed-media sculptures for wall, floor and mobile, a mural-scale photomontage, audio interventions, and text-based sculptures culled from its dialog. 

    Alison O’Daniel, Sound Segregations – Birds and Construction, 2022. Courtesy Commonwealth & Council.

    The entrance is activated by the fire-engine red Neighbor Relations (powder-coated steel & aluminum, 2022)—a giant suspended wind chime whose charms are stylizations of Awet’s hand. Nearby is an oversized rug made of wool, nylon and, crucially, sound-swallowing carpet, Awet’s (Non)dominant Hand (2022). The hand motif repeats along with a red-and-white pattern based on the injury-inflicting saws—a rust-patinated collection of which hang from the ceiling in “Threat to Language.” The photos show hundreds of sonic booms—something we think of as a sound yet has a visible manifestation.

    Energy converters in the walls vibrate and hum, directly invoking the noises roaring off the LAX flight paths—over neighborhoods with no power to resist or ameliorate the low rumble, which can be felt as vibrations as well as heard as disruptions. Around the edges of the room, about a dozen white caption sculptures whose industrial font cut-out words comprise the Sound Segregations—Birds and Construction (powder-coated steel, 2022) say things like “We open the windows because we don’t have air conditioning /The planes come every two minutes, so we wait to talk /Santa Ana winds cover us in soot and sound.” In its approximation of a domestic environment, the elements reference engaging, amped-up versions of ordinary decor, but O’Daniel turns it all inside out to not only communicate the nuances of events, but to generate a direct experience for the viewer—and break some sound barriers of her own.

  • Ei Arakawa Overduin & Co.

    Ei Arakawa
    Overduin & Co.

    The initial apprehension upon entry to Ei Arakawa’s exhibition took a few moments to subside. It was swiftly alleviated upon realizing that it is not an exhibition in the typical sense but more of a journey through a cardboard-constructed maze: a metaphorical commentary surrounding the parallels, juxtapositions and complexities of child-rearing and art-making. 

    Stenciled lettering on each side of the walls of the tall cardboard labyrinth revealed declarations in green, red, purple and black. The initial statement boldly declared “ARTISTS SHOULD NOT HAVE A CHILD.” This set the inaugural theme of the exhibition, juxtaposed with baby mobiles hanging from beams across the top of the maze. Statements that follow include “I’M NOT GOING TO REMEMBER HOW TO PAINT AGAIN,” “ARTIST-PARENTS AS INSECURE VOCALOIDS” and “MUSEUM, BE FLEXIBLE! ARTIST-PARENT.COM.”

    Passage through the maze is accompanied by strange electronic music from multiple sources that effortlessly carries through the cardboard partitions. Ambient sounds were interjected with genderless “vocaloid” voices singing strange phrases. Helpful gallerists supply press releases and lyric sheets as the viewer continues through the maze. This serves as an a-ha! moment, revealing that the statements on the wall were the satirical and humorous (though pertinent) words which were also sung by the synthesized voices. The lyrics, written by Arakawa, suggest the struggle between simultaneously carrying out roles of both artist and parent; the music score was composed by Arakawa and Celia Hollander.

    Ei Arakawa, Installation view. Courtesy Overduin & Co.

    The hallways of the maze opened into three separate rooms (perhaps wombs) that offered chairs for contemplation and listening. Both in the hallways of the maze and in the lounging rooms were replicas of famous paintings by American artists, both living and dead, reproduced by thousands of LED lights. The images included works by Mary Cassatt, Nicole Eisenmann, Alice Neel, Laura Owens and Trevor Shimizu. The connecting factor between all the LED paintings were that they were famous scenes of childhood and/or parenthood from art history; the title of the show comes from Laura Owens painting “Don’t Give Up” and was placed in the largest room of the maze. 

    Included in this large room was a quartet of carriages occupied by alternating toy babies—one white, one brown, one white, one brown. As if the words were not enough, the installation of these plastic babies overtly—yet humorously—proclaimed the exhibition a paean to parenthood. Surrounding these carriages were the statements “WE ARE NON-BIRTH DADS WE ARE QUEER MUMS” indicating Arakawa’s own “psychic preparation for planned queer parenthood” (from the artist statement). Most artists of child-rearing age couldn’t help but deeply connect with the absurd truth, humor and insecurity embedded in each aspect of this exhibit. As the art historical references suggest, one strategy for being a parent and artist is to make work about children. But for Arakawa, “I’M NOT THAT IMPRESSIONIST.”