Renata & Friends: A Photographic Essay Of Soft Sculpture By Cassandra Bickman

Sally Knows How To Party

Sally Knows How To Party

I was in a deep sleep one night at my great grandmother’s small town midwestern home, when suddenly I heard a loud crash downstairs. I put on her old blue silk robe, and walked down the rickety staircase to her green shag carpet basement with those old vinyl wooden walls, mugged with that dense musty smell midwestern basements have, with a slight scent of cigar smoke lingering in the air. To my surprise, The Versatile Henry Mancini and His Orchestra record was playing, and as I turned the corner, this strange silhouette was hanging from an old crystal chandelier, and another was laughing hysterically as it had crashed into the glass coffee table below. It was the strangest thing, it was 3am, and it appeared that I had walked into the winding down sloppy haze of a midnight soirée! As I further opened my eyes, I realized that it was my very own CLOSET that had come alive!! In awe, I sat down on the pink floral couch next to my favorite green suit whom introduced themselves to me as “Irene and Eileen the inflatable siamese twins”, they were classy yet bizarre, and were telling me an intriguing story about their favorite lizard named Susan and her popsicle stand in the desert.

 
Irene & Eileen, The Inflatable Siamese Twins

Irene & Eileen, The Inflatable Siamese Twins

 

It was Renata hanging from the chandelier, who told me she was my dad’s lady friend, and Maude to my right, who told me she liked to model as she poured me a sparkling glass of champagne. My favorite white leather jacket Sally had a real swagger, and Toby was obsessively puffing away at my grandpa’s old cigars. Then out came stumbling this very unpredictable figure from the bathroom who was Nancy, she was telling us this absurd story about how she was once a nanny who became an assassin. In another corner sat Big Red, who was a bit frozen as he told me he drank some beetle juice and was feeling a bit stunned. I later found my black silk gown sitting on the floor as she had taken a slight dose of acid and was in the midst of an epiphany, her name was Tiffany. I partied with them until just before sunrise, when I passed out on that floral couch with a tantalized smile. 

Maud likes to Model

Maud likes to Model

Toby In His Tuxedo

Toby In His Tuxedo

As I opened my eyes the next morning, I looked around to greet my new friends, yet they had all vanished into deflated empty piles of my very own clothes on the ground. When I told my grandma over coffee the next morning, she oddly just gave me a mischievous smirk when I told her what had happened, as if this wasn’t the first time this sort of thing happened here late at night. She said nothing more, and neither did I. Luckily, there was an old camera lying on the ground that night, and these photos that I snapped are all that I have left to reconcile the daze of this splendid, mysterious evening. 

 
 

King Dogs Never Grow Old: A Group Show Curated By Brooke Wise @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles

Borrowed from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s surrealist text Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the show’s title alludes to exploring the nonsensical and the dreamlike unconscious. The work on view shares a common dialogue and aims to explore these surrealist notions in a contemporary manner.

Jillian Mayer and Haley Josephs use color and whimsy to address these surrealist concepts. Ginny Casey draws inspiration from classic Walt Disney cartoons and welcomes the spectator with distorted, absurd and disproportioned objects, which play with our restrictions of logic and time. Tom of Finland celebrates sexuality, fantasy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor. Scott Reeder and Matthew Sweesy both use comedy and rhetoric in their paintings. Chris Wolston’s Nalgona chairs are humanized by his addition of wicker body parts. Sam Crow’s tufted wall works skew our sense of reality and attempt to destroy our sense of stability in her usage of geometric shapes and dimension. Rose Nestler’s soft sculptures explore the body as the subconscious mind. Bri Williams uses found objects often with personal associations, to evoke a potent, psychic mood. Minimalist artist Robert Moreland reinvents his canvas into the space between painting and sculpture, while Haley Mellin’s small paintings reinvent mundane objects such as a Warholian banana floating in space. Through comedy, rhetoric, sarcasm and the uncanny, these works all share a common discourse about surrealism, the unexpected and the unconventional.

King Dogs Never Grow Old is on view through February 1st at Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

New Museum Presents "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel" The First American Survey Of The Artist's Oeuvre

Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, she has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into disorienting, confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. This presentation, which takes place across the three main floors of the New Museum, brings together more than 150 works in photography, sculpture, and installation to reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of Surrealism—from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the absurd.

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period, which reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never before been shown together in the US. Lucas has also created new sculptural works for the exhibition, including This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven (2018), a severed 2003 Jaguar X-Type—the car’s back half burned and its front half collaged with cigarettes—and VOX POP DORIS (2018), a pair of eleven-foot-tall thigh-high platform boots cast in concrete.

Au Naturel is on view through January 20, 2019 at the New Museum 235 Bowery New York, 10002. photographs by Adam Lehrer