Are we there yet?
On Vacation in Homescapes at HOMETEAM Gallery,
curated by Julia Anderson, featuring works from residents of Actualize Artist In Residence at 500 Pike: Alissa Dymally Williams, C.M. Ruiz, Gabriel Bello Diaz (Gabo), Nadia Ahmed, Noel Kat, McKinley Smith (TERRAMOTO), Pilar Gordillo, Shannon Hobbs, Sanoe Stevenson-Egeland. All image credits to Stefan Gonzales.
Interpretations of “home” are insinuated well enough as the basis of the works in Homescapes; it is practically insisted on by the name of the gallery. It was “vacation” who quickly entered the chat, centering itself in conversations between my girlfriend, Onjoli, and I while attending the soft opening. In the everything-out-in-the-open space, snug with humans socializing around the work, we went straight to the back wall.
Gabo and Sanoe Stevenson-Egeland’s works existing close to each other provided an intense draw to this saturated corner of pigments. The tightness of Stevenson-Egeland’s painted text contrasts the loose, viscous, repetitive mark-making by Gabo; it is the fierceness of her text versus the thickness of Gabo’s marks.
In front of the smaller triad paintings by Gabo I tell Onjoli, It is on the brink of becoming a vacation-type painting, to which she responds, oh, it is one hundred percent a vacation to me. Barely differentiating in size, I felt the gimmick of the marks slowly working on me as I analyzed them. The balance of color streaks in each stroke are so even in shape and size and delicately close to each other it succeeded in directing my eyes in a frenzy all over that surface of the vast depiction of space, even though the horizon lines are presenting themselves so blatantly. I imagine the painting like this: Bam, here is a straight line — obviously it is a horizon. Oh, and also here is a tiny figure, you won’t even see it until you are right in front of it. Surprise! One of the figures is releasing a red balloon and there is a glitchy VR experience which depicts the balloon “drifting away”— when it works, it is cool.
Another figure present is surfing a wave in the center canvas of a three part painting. It is simply a silly feeling these characters give me, one lying on a towel at the bottom of the lowest canvas depicting the shoreline. I continue to tell her, There is a sense of depth and place, even if I don’t have that little guy in there…there is still a sense of leisure. However, It is also really funny and cute that there is a little guy in there. Ultimately, I enjoy the ability to control the evenly clustering marks over the tiny presences. To me, they either need to be less direct, or as crisply described as that horizon line.
I find Onjoli next admiring work by McKinley Smith, I tell her, this artist’s favorite artist must be Tom Sachs. She has no idea who that is. A quick google search of “tom sachs space program” works well to draw a comparison between the two. She simply says to me I feel like I am on the moon. I admire the personal statement that is beautifully fabricated into the surface of this moon. The edges are clean, the partial “Wish You Were Here” and craters are perfectly defined. Smith’s work deserves an award for craft, especially being placed next to C.M. Ruiz’s long and clunky cut paper collage piece.
It is duct tape, she states looking at C.M. Ruiz’s piece. I honestly don’t understand his work. I ask her to tell me more. She says it feels sloppy and fast, and that that is a “thing” (a tactic she means), but it is not doing anything for me. My response to her aims at identifying something meditative and positive in the arrangement of the shapes and evidence of the process. If you step back, or immaculately document the image and shrink it down to screen viewing, you lose the details of the “sloppiness.” Eventually, she says what is on my mind: it feels like a first draft…my favorite thing is that straw. The straw she points to is a very crisp and well-gestured rendition of a bendy straw; its precision out performs the edges of the larger cut paper pieces. We discuss how raw and how simple it is when you disect the process. I am going to make this tonight, no problem, she claims.
I did love Onjoli’s automatic arrival to a place in her memory where she was making things as a child, saying, it reminds me of something I would make when I was thirteen; folding paper, cutting a shape and unfolding it to reveal something magical to Rorschach blot enthusiasts. To be fair, this work looks amazing as a graphic, but I wanted it to take up the whole wall, or really commit to the duct tape and the small splatters of glue that ended up in places they shouldn't. In its carefreeness it became too cautious. As we continue to talk I become completely disarmed (and rather existential) by her further analysis of making work in our studios as basically being adult play time.
Playing is a fortuitous aid to learning, though. Results of play become deeper vessels for growth if the opportunity is taken more seriously. Then it is more than play. I mean, the obsessive details found in the miniature replicas of vanishing Seattle spots by Noel Kat go beyond playing around. The care quite literally pulls one closer to see into the tiny, dimly lit room in a place I am convinced I can squeeze into.
A favorite moment of the night was losing Onjoli for a second. I was engaged in a conversation and then found her…hiding from Alissa Dymally Williams’s piece? She was standing and facing it with one hand over both of her eyes. Look at it like this, baby. It is totally an eye squinting at me. After clarifying that she was blocking out the white sections by looking through a mere slit between her middle fingers, I mimicked her pose, attempting to see what she is seeing. I don’t see it.
Baby, I say to her, we are looking at the stand of a table, as if the photo was taken from just under the table, pointed down to the linoleum floor…see the feet? I think she sees it, but clearly she also enjoys experiencing the work through the slit in her fingers. How did she even think to do that? It is oddly reminiscent of the process Williams went through to achieve these diverse, mirroring prints, exposing the same film over and over again to light between plunges into a bath in the hopes of fucking with the image enough mid-development to slip from the viewer. Williams explained the process much better.
Some of the work got lost in the space for me. The wax ones, specifically, by Shannon Hobbs (on the left, which is not present in this gorgeous documentation I received from Stefan Gonzales, unfortunately) and Nadia Ahmed (right). I almost missed both, and since Ahmed’s is on a skinny wall adjacent to a cluttered backspace and Hobbs’s is placed on the floor (that really made me nervous) it is easy to look past them, and I made intentional effort to get close to them. I also find the bag pieces by Gabo to be disruptive to the space, and a bit gawky. It was feeding into those feelings of gimmicks in artworks in a negative way, even though the bags were neatly constructed and sturdy-looking.
Our final conversation was in front of the painting immediately to the left when you enter Hometeam. Awarded by Onjoli as the most chill painting ever is one by Pilar Gordillo. The way the hill becomes a vaporous road, the unusual tree, the lone bottle, and the vibrant break of light on the other side of the scape create a quality of memory unlike the others; one that materializes and lingers like a loose fog. Onjoli’s mind is blown away by the way our brains are able to understand the insinuation of perspective in a painting. Gordillo’s is the only painting that actually rescinds into space in a more “traditional” sense. I try to explain it to her, you know, vanishing points in landscape paintings, the traditional grid used to push back the perspective, etc. She can’t believe how dumb our brains are to be tricked by such tactics. I can’t wait for her to experience the repoussoir or trompe l’œil, for real.
I quickly typed this into my notes that night:
This one I really loved a lot because it is so basic
They all remind her of vacation.
I thought about what she said:
this painting is about “just kicking it.”
Plus, there’s a beer.
A note from me: I fully intended to produce this piece of writing before this show opened on April’s First Thursday. And then I intended for it to be up before the closing. I was sitting on the couch with Onjoli and her boys watching Ratatouille while scrambling to put thoughts down that festered in my head for nearly three weeks. I am finishing these edits as a drone whirrs around my head and our living-room, piloted by Onjoli’s six-year-old (I lost a small lock of hair). My space has been…rather full lately. So, to these artists and Julia Anderson, thank you for taking me into your spaces and existing in my brain like the memories of vacation. I am looking forward to experiencing Homebodies, on view May 1st, First Thursday, at Hometeam: 310 Occidental Ave S.
