I know this feeling. I was here before: On Basic Essentials

The first chain convenience store in the United States opened in Dallas, Texas in 1927 by the

Southland Ice Company, which later became 7-Eleven. I’ve always been fascinated by gas

stations and convenience stores; when I was a kid I would beg my parents to let my sister

and I ride our razor scooters to the Kum & Go two blocks up from our house to get a koolie slushie

and Funyuns. Since the 1960s many convenience stores have chosen to stay open

24 hours a day and are stocked like a first aid kit packed by MacGyver. Every single

convenience store is a microcosm supporting the surrounding neighborhood: a cool rest-stop

in the heat; a bathroom when you can’t hold it in on the way home; a comforting indifference

of the counter person listening to you cry about your car not starting, or something sweet to

satisfy the end or fuel the beginning of a brutal day. This infrastructure exists on a transient

spectrum of encouragement and excess and merges functionality with desperate necessity

alongside strange but wonderful trinkets.

These spaces and experiences come to mind while walking through Basic Essentials, a two part

traveling exchange exhibition produced in partnership by Charlotte Street Foundation

and Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland, California curated by Zoë Taleporos, a former

Co-director at Royal Nonesuch Gallery. This exhibition is an introspection of the way we

attach our public and private selves to everyday objects, and moreover how these objects

provide us with a sense of belonging or isolation. I had the opportunity to work on and visit

each installment of the show. This review will be speaking specifically to the show’s current

location in Oakland where it will be up through August 26th at Royal Nonesuch Gallery. In

regards to Basic Essentials traveling cross-country, this show is also about the merging of

artist communities between the Bay area and Kansas City.

Mending the Chip in the BIGCup

Rather than justifying our needs and actions to care for ourselves, I feel that in this

regard Brandon Forrest Frederick’s work is both an affirmation and a tender kind of

fanaticism. Where Frederick is elevating scraps of trash to be held in a parade of double

rainbows lined with streamers and graced with a halo of lightning bolts, he is dissecting the

white noise of everyday life to further draw attention to the way that we aestheticize objects

beyond their use value.

Maybe, no, this is not my beautiful vase, but why not? Where is my beautiful vase? What

have I done? I can’t look for it, I give up. Why am I giving up? I do have a vase.

Leaning up against a wall of mostly its own is Frederick’s Still Life. Here, we see a milk jug

painted blue carefully holding a dwindling branch of leaves, set in a back-lit and gilded frame

perched on top of a pedestal. In most of Frederick’s work is a gentle gesture to reconsider

the sunsets at the end of the driveway—Still Life acts as a point of departure in Frederick’s

journey to care-fully uplift bits of waste from its futile end to call awareness to how we identify

and measure ourselves in our consumerist society. It’s the first time where we as viewers are

separated from the anonymous hands we use to see or infer in his work. The hands that

stack and rearrange wrappers and snake skins, the hands that reach for the sky exist, but

still feel omnipresent.

Brandon Forrest Frederick, STILL LIFE, 2018.

Photo credit Graham Holoch, image courtesy of Royal Nonesuch Gallery and Zoë Taleporos.

Across the gallery is a similar image, Still Life (purple) by Will Toney. Having both a sprinkle

of ritual-like reverence and a bit of organized chaos to the placement of props, this

photograph is swarming with plants, swisher wrappers, styrofoam cups, the heels of three Air

Jordans, and is lit with electric-3D-inspiring reds and blues. Toney is quoting the traditional

still lives we have all seen on the walls of encyclopedic museums. The difference, however,

between Toney’s work and a painting of a European fruit bowl is the way that he is

presenting the viewer with the traces and icons of African American culture and is making

them hypervisible. Some items could be artifacts, some could have been picked up from the

sidewalk or pulled out of the back of a car, some plants could be plastic and some could

have just been cut from a garden plot. The scene Toney offers us is like a time-warp of the

past, present, and future. He has rejected what can and cannot be seen as beautiful or

worthy of being preserved. What Frederick and Toney share is this: when we are all tired,

they ask us to look behind the shells of what we find important and share in a moment of

grace and goof.

William Toney, Stilllife (purple), 2017.

Photo credit Graham Holoch, image courtesy of Royal Nonesuch Gallery and Zoë Taleporos.

Honey, I think I’ve been hypnotized.

To the left and above Frederick’s Still Life in a high corner of the room are two white shelves

with two pairs of yellow and red Gerber daisies. The amount of distance between each shelf

and the ceiling is shorter so that the flowers are just barely smushed up against the shelves

—this is Mark Benson’s Open Fields. Due to the ceiling, the flowers are just out of reach of

the sky, these flowers are also out of reach of their caretakers. As I stood under the flowers I

could hear in my head Bing Crosby singing “Oh give me land lots of land under starry skies

above, dooooooooooooon’t fence me in…” and I chuckled imagining the routine of trying to

give light and water these flowers in someone’s home, or eventually trashing them if they die.

We need plants, in general, to provide us with cleaner air and aesthetically we crave green

space in places that don’t always allow for them to flourish; we pine for more time to take

care of ourselves and our home than we are actually in them. As much as we’re advertised

products that we may fit into our homes, the truth is that we may never be able to actualize

or internalize their supposed potential. What is possible of the objects that Benson represents

to us, whether they may be as simple as a plant or as complex as a Roomba, is the

creation of lines of confinement.

Mark Benson, Open Fields, 2013-18.

Photo credit Graham Holoch, image courtesy of Royal Nonesuch Gallery and Zoë Taleporos

Leaning in the opposite corner of the room is a looping video on a white monitor by Mik

Gaspay. Roses, Botellón_(Orbit) displays two roses stretching up and slightly curving out

from a white vase. The two roses orbit hypnotically in a smooth swivel spiral to reach for

light. The source of light and location these suspended pots exist in is unknown, separating

us from the windowsill or table they could be living on. Tell me little blossom, what do you

wish for? Projected on the wall behind this monitor is another continual video Football,

Football Player (Timekeeper), in which a statuette of a QB has no number or team on his

jersey, whose hero is he? The white chubby-cheeked football player teeters back and forth,

running in place forever on top of a white painted football. There is a circular dream logic to

the way that these otherwise inanimates move. Flowers, vases, figurines—they are often in

the periphery of our attention where here they are independent and want to be understood.

Gaspay’s and Benson’s work reminds me of an episode of The Twilight Zone called “The

After Hours.” The closing narration questions our autonomy as humans.

Marsha White, in her normal and natural state, a wooden lady with a painted face who, one

month out of the year, takes on the characteristics of someone as normal and as flesh and

blood as you and I. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just how normal are we? Just who

are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street?

In the episode Marsha White gets seemingly trapped in a mysterious unmarked level of a

department store, as she attempts to break free, the mannequins begin to speak to her and

remind her of her place among them.

Mik Gaspay, Football, Football Player (Timekeeper), 2018 and Roses, Botellón_(Orbit), 2018. Photo credit Graham Holoch, image courtesy of Royal Nonesuch Gallery and Zoë Taleporos.

Where’s the hole? Did you plug the gap?

To the left of the gallery entrance is Magic Crystal 8 Ball by Laura Rokas. Two long-fingered

severed hands decorated with rings and red stiletto nails are planted around a magic 8 ball

that has advised to “ask again l8er.” This ceramic work tricks your eye at first because it was

molded out of cardboard, a video mounted on the wall directly across from piece are the

same hands in their original cardboard state. As femme pop songs play in the background

the hands perform tasks like painting or cutting fruit. What really drew me into Rokas’ work is

the feedback loop being questioned, that being the generalization of what it means to be

feminine. At the Kansas City installment of Basic Essentials, a quilt called R.O.K.A.S. (Rage

Out, Kut and Scratch) was shown. Brightly colored iron-on patches were sprawled all over it.

When I saw these patches I thought about this piece as a wide-reaching self-portrait for

modern adolescence. All my high school heroines from Rookie Mag or individual artists like

Peggy Noland and Tuesday Bassin. Capitalism chewed on their content and over the last

couple of years spat it back up onto the shelves of Zara and Urban Outfitters. I and people

like me appreciated them for fiercely doing and sharing what they loved. Each patch on

R.O.K.A.S. (Rage Out, Kut and Scratch), just like a girl scout’s, is representational of an ache

to share the stripes of working through something. Like breaking up with a shit-head who

gaslit you or made you feel inferior, the first time that you smoked a cigarette and flipped

over two luckies in the back of a pack, or the time you realized your sun sign is the same as

your best friend’s moon sign. We adhered these patches onto our jean jackets and our

hearts because we felt that we were identified with for the first time in however long and that

we would be seen and heard. Now, they are, can be, and will continue to be easily mass

reproduced and co-opted, so while we feel special we know that it’s not destiny making it for

us, rather it’s for our demographic. Cultural relevance isn’t all bad, but where is the line

between that and kitsch exhaustion?

Laura Rokas Magic Crystal 8 Ball, 2018.

Photo credit Graham Holoch, image courtesy of Royal Nonesuch Gallery and Zoë

Taleporos.

Bisecting the gallery in half is a set of VHS tapes and two small tube T.V.s. resting on a

bench with chairs and headphones for visitors to watch. On the screens are two looping

videos connected by their subject, a young individual named Melissa. On the right screen,

you see her being interviewed by the maker Kendell Harbin as a part of her nomadic ad hoc

VHS library, media, and research center the Roaming Center for Magnetic Alternatives

(also the RCMA). On the left screen, a viewer sees the home movies they are talking about

in tandem. Interviewing queer folks, like Melissa, as they roll through childhood home movies

recorded onto tape and discuss growing up as a queer individual in the Midwest has been

one aspect of this project. Through other activities like hosting readings, offering workshops,

converting tapes to digital files, The RCMA seeks to explore the correlation between queer

history and a medium on the edge of obsolescence. The tapes stacked between the T.V.s

and the videos playing on the screen are a nod to the brief 30-year timeline in which people

around Kendell’s and my own age were growing up. VHS is a distinct timepiece, the first

VHS tape was released in 1976 and production halted in 2006 with A History Of Violence.

This technology has since been scrapped by mainstream manufacturers and the film

industry, because of this a major portion of a living generation’s physical relation to their own

lineage has been discarded. As the home movies fold into one another I think of all of the

audio physically recorded and lost—think of someone literally throwing away your voice. I

think of hearing a lagging breath stretched out by the pulling of tape or the melting and

warping of it in an incinerator or trash compressor. I think of the earnestness of memory, by

developing this rolling archive Harbin is saving this information for future generations and is

too providing historical relevance to the stories shared. As a result, she is making space for

this information to further impact and ease someone else’s mind, and know that they are not

alone.

Roaming Center for Magnetic Alternatives, ongoing, a project by Kendell Harbin.

Photo credit Graham Holoch, image courtesy of Royal Nonesuch Gallery and Zoë Taleporos.

Diving Makes the Water Deeper

Lately, I’ve been really interested in how we internalize “less is more” simultaneously with our

need to compensate for a lack of something. Is it really down to our individual will(s) to

decide whether or not we really need or desire something? For some yes, for others, I

wonder how much our society has conditioned us to believe that yes, less is more, but to

really get it you need to buy the bulk pack of Charmin ultra strong.

There is and will continue to be in the art world a draw to supersize your practice, from

citywide biennials, retrospectives, billboards, Meow Wolf sized installations and monuments.

Working bigger allows individuals an opportunity to witness and be a part of a greater

dialogue, and to potentially become fully immersed in an artwork or exhibition. Over time I

have become more suspicious of how we easily confuse scale and movement with progress

—still, greater space does allow for an individual artist to play in a discerning way by holding

a magnifying glass to questions they have for their work. In the second installment at Royal

Nonesuch Gallery, Taleporos sifted down the 26 works shown in KC to 8; the result of this

exchange process was like a harmonica breath. Being able to see the evolution in Basic

Essentials allowed me to gain a new appreciation for smaller gallery spaces in general by

joining a Powers of Ten like caravan.6 The show at La Esquina was like seeing the earth

from space, you can see how the oceans fold over and into each other and how countries

reach out. The exhibition at Royal Nonesuch gallery is more like a picnic, distilling the

conversations down to a close distance for coexistence.

On my way home from Oakland wandering through the airport kiosks looking for my terminal

I thought about all of the road stops I have made just to wander up and down the aisles of a

convenience store and thinking of collecting all of the souvenirs I could see—from an “I Miss

Obama” bumper sticker, to a clip-on dashboard incense holder, or the ten-year-old alligator

paw keychain I liberated somewhere in Iowa. Looking back, what captures my attention is

the duality of the extreme compression of utility and eccentricity. In between these two things

is a catalyst for mundane and passing miracles between people and things.

Postscript:

In the wake of the recent article published on Hyperallergic “Acknowledging the

Intellectual Labor of Curators in a Museum” I would also like to recognize and emphasize

the intellectual, emotional, and physical labor that went into executing Basic Essentials. By

the staff at Charlotte Street Foundation, the Royal Nonesuch Gallery team, and by the

curator Zoë Taleporos.