San FranciscoBy Laura Richard Janku
Published: August 2, 2006
GALLERY EXHIBITIONS:
“Naughty: Keith Boadwee, James Gobel, Thorina Rose and Ken Weaver”
Veteran bad-boy Keith Boadwee has always been overt in his naughtiness, and his collages on view at this group show don’t disappoint. Clipped from the pages of fashion glossies and skin mags, images of some of Boadwee’s “favorite things”—celebrities, luxury consumer goods, animals and porn stars—are piled high into over-stimulated works that entice the eye and provoke the mind and libido.
Thorina Rose’s gouaches accomplish the rare feat of being able to appeal to both a cutting-edge 21st-century ’zine crowd—as well as a petticoat-and-powdered wig, 18th-century audience. Rose’s work evokes a latter day Antoine Watteau, in which traditional sexual roles and symbolism have been inverted: Femme satyrs relentlessly chase men in scenes replete with bizarre, psychologically charged details. The linear style, limited palette and penchant for profiles recall Egyptian painting and street art as much as the subject deconstructs the roles of rococo mistresses and masters.
Ken Weaver’s sumptuous, crimson pastels depict decadent interiors in which masked orgies are taking place amidst chandeliers and cherubim. Weaver’s attention to the furnishings’ elaborate details and patterns make the backgrounds more visually interesting than the sex acts they surround. There should be plans to produce bolts of tawdry toile from these bawdy vignettes—perfect for upholstering the chairs in a libertine’s library.
The assertive and curling black outlines, and the exuberant palette, in James Gobel’s works bring to mind 1960s psychedelic rock posters. But his subject matter and material is neither graphic nor dated. Created from inlaid pieces of felt, these reductive portraits of big, gender-bending men tweak the conventions of craft and beauty. The beautiful line and divine colors give the images a sensual glow that would make Ziggy Stardust, Prince and Lee Bowery proud.
For the disparate artists in this show—who use a wide variety of processes to create their work—the medium is always a big part of the message.
Drawing permits Candice Lin to create intimate, fragile drawings whose style and scale mimics early Americana works—while their subject matter attacks ethnographic practices. The wispy, sketchy lines draw us close and then spring their violence and psychological force.
By contrast, Tim Sullivan’s varied media reflect a carpe diem approach to expression itself. A kitschy tourist attraction—a video booth that inserts the payer into a sleigh ride high over scenes of San Francisco—is the occasion and the production site for a DVD. Rather than sag under the weight of its myriad pop cultural and art-historical references, Magic Carpet Ride is levitated by its infectious silliness and soundtrack. Similarly indebted to the music industry (and serving as an homage to Felix Gonzales-Torres) is a large pile of DayGlo-colored matchbooks printed with song titles; hence its own title, 450,000 x Disaster (Songs about California and the Devil).
Where Sullivan uses sound, technology and music in casual service to his one-liners, Sean Horchy orchestrates interactive works that encourage viewers to experiment with the endless aural and visual possibilities of digital manipulation. For this show, there is a video clip of a kettle that begins to boil and whistle. Using an electronic keyboard and its many dials, the viewer pixellates and distorts both image and sound ad infinitum. The end product? The process itself. |
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