Opening Reception Saturday, July 7th 2007 7 – 11pm
SUMMER SPLASH
curated by JUBAL BROWN & LAURA HORNE
The Christopher Cutts Gallery is pleased to announce our summer group exhibition SUMMER SPLASH, featuring painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture by the gallery’s artists and invited guests.
Summer night, in the shade of the sumac trees, a quiet breeze blows. Under the moon the night unfolds, dark and wet, strange and dangerous, inviting.
What creatures lurk in the nebulous heat of the summer, what monsters pass unseen in the shadows of the night, engaging in their solemn rights, plotting seditionary action, or bellying up to the lemonade stand for a mojito?
In the exhibition Summer Splash its mostly children and animals. The 74 artworks included are linked by a shameless playfulness, a fearless innocence, and an indulgence of fantasy, part mythology and part dark psychology, part horrific, part erotic, and all beautiful.
Mat Brown’s ink drawings are executed in meticulous detail as tight and graphically intense as money, present a pleasant facade under which lies the violent and sexual subject matter: the mythological butchering of the satyr Marsyas by Apollo.
In Peggy Kouroumalos’ small drawings fauns and nymphs gaze out from out from a perfect blue grove they and naked and sexy and they blush only slightly.
Tibi Tibi Neuspiel’s moon relief in accurate detail hangs high on the wall, in the sky of the gallery, above the snow globes of Sherri Hay in which ambiguous disasters destroy civilization. When shaken, the maelstrom of debris that flies and swirls around the exploding buildings is made up of people, dogs, furniture, detritus thrown by a hurricane or a nuclear blast or an act of God.
Lurid primates peer ravenously out of the rich blue darkness of Rory Dean’s Rembrant-like oils. Hung along side his portraits of children casually interacting with giant insects and mollusks they pose a strange anthropology of wonder.
The Richard Stipl installation called Secret Weapon IV is an explosion of cherubic babies in some exalted flight accompanied, or perhaps attacked, by giant white birds. The babies pupil-less eyes stare vacantly into space, sightless, like newborn animals.
The interactive mechanical sculpture of Gerald Baer is a depraved adaptation of a coin operated children’s ride. A foreboding pig constructed from metal, butchers paper, real meat and lipstick. It functions like a mechanical bull bucking away while its giant cock throbs and pumps the air.
Ted Tuckers large work “Road Rockets Alien Nation” shows a gang of young toughs drinking and rabble rousing in the streets of suburbia; in mid roar they are surprised by an unexplained supernatural occurrence.
At the opening reception, a full scale event, the performance of Ulysses Castellanos entitled “The Angry Clown” and the performance of Don Simmons: “The Cult of Tactical Media’s Face Painting For Kids”, both reveal a childlike play and a flirtation with danger, the face painting, part of a ritualistic process, includes the confession of ones deepest desires.
The one feeling that runs deep through all the works is a stillness in the midst of a frozen explosion, in the disaster globes, the Stipl babies; the hormonal explosion, the explosion of innocence, of the pubescent children in the eerie charcoal drawings of Christopher Lori wherein armies of little girls do battle with demons, wielding axes and knives, and emerge victorious in a radiant ambivalent sensuality.
Tasman Richardson’s Diptych of light-boxes showing the appropriated faces of a young blonde girl and a blonde woman facing both images we are caught between age and youth, innocence and experience.
This is where the wild things are. On the periphery of civilization, in fragments of children’s nursery rhymes, in the cradle of dreams, somewhere between reality and fantasy a marauding band of enfants terrible playing cruel games, in the moonlight.
