Artists Casey Kauffmann and John de Leon Martin have created a super-collage at Human Resources, Los Angeles. A messy collision of screens, drawings and passionfruit vines engulf the gallery space with the intention to bamboozle. The duet’s maximalist installation conjoins Kauffmann and Martin’s longstanding interest in the construction, circulation and consumption of images as a means of forming identity. A sinister humor pulses through the exhibition, as each artist presents cultural ephemera from the internet and popular culture–from Super Mario to the real housewives– intentionally introducing familiar tropes only to subvert them. This destabilization makes room for discussion of queer and feminine desire, pain and possibility.

In artist Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen,  she writes that poor images are “the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores. They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images…they spread pleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories or bootlegs, resistance or stultification.” Kauffmann and Martin blur the lines between fantasy and reality, mining landscapes of reproduction and fragmented imagination, presenting limitless possibilities out of cultural detritus. As Kauffmann, Martin and Steyrel suggest, the “poor image” contains a  reality that is both prescribed and constructed.

Human Resources LA
410 Cottage Home St
LA CA 90012
On view through August 20, 2022