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4/2/2003

Day of War, Nights of Love

G-module, Paris

The group of New York-based artists in g-module’s DAYS OF WAR, NIGHTS OF LOVE walk a fine line between documentation and apocrypha. Curated by artist Seth McBride, these works play with the tension that surfaces when art transforms socio-historic specifics into an emotional or mythical state. Engaging dialogues about issues of alienation, mass media, technology and war, the works in this exhibition share a sensibility rife with apocalyptic undercurrents.

As a group, the works of REYNOLD REYNOLDS & PATRICK JOLLEY, CHRISTOPH DRAEGER, LAURA EMRICK, JENNY GAGE, CHARLES LORETO & EMILY O’CONNOR, SETH MCBRIDE and LISA ROY share a sense of loss for a more innocent state of mind, yet without falling into easy nostalgia. These artists seem to tell us that the good times of our youth came at a cost. The party is over, and the hangover’s gonna bite you hard on the ass.

Burn is the third film REYNOLD REYNOLDS and PATRICK JOLLEY have made together. Their second film, The Drowning Room, received an honorable mention at Sundance 2000, also receiving an award at SXSW, 2000. Burn is a narrative collage, peopled with devils, angels, and allegorical creatures. A house burns from the inside while its occupants focus on the emotional issues of their lives. The inhabitants serve life sentences with no remission in an architecture of insecurity while impending disaster is ignored.

LAURA EMRICK, characteristically displaying a fascination with the final frontier, shows a transparent fluorescent mobile resembling a chandelier of glowing futuristic fighter planes in formation. The three dimensional planes at once recall the simple construction of folded paper models, as well as computer graphic wire frame animations; the glowing plastic edge conceptually plays between the second and third dimensions, while simultaneously describing the iconic and ironic status of the warplane.

JENNY GAGE hints at darker, more menacing urges. She situates young women in anonymous suburban tableaux: the postwar American Dream implodes into a claustrophobic ennui on the verge of panic and rage. Her photography has appeared in Vogue and Self Service, while her artwork has been seen in her solo show at Luhring Augustine Gallery in NYC.

The brother/sister team of CHARLES LORETO and EMILY O’CONNOR’s video, Pool Service: Pool Skating Youth in the 70s rocks with adolescent angst. Digitally remastered from super 8 home movies, this fast-paced video careens along to the punk beats of the Ramones. The skateboarders epitomize the force of teen adrenalin and the need for movement. Ironically, their uncontrollable energies are trapped within the concrete belly of an empty swimming pool.

Curator and artist SETH MCBRIDE’s photographic prints on canvas recompose footage of bomb explosions into aesthetic abstractions. A commentary on geopolitical power strategies, the work also plays with artistic categories, toying with definitions of painting, photography and appropriation tactics.

LISA ROY’s neon-tinged photographs of cruise ship interiors underscore the seamless artifice of plastic architectural fantasies. Her images point out the banality of commodified leisure, even as they seduce us with their glitzy, disco-futuristic decadence. Holland Cotter of The New York Times describes them as "space age version(s) of the Playboy mansion."

CHRISTOPH DRAEGER duels with fiction and reality to evoke the emotional impact caused by disasters and acts of violence. This obsession with destruction, its unpredictable nature and the voyeuristic fascination it inspires, is seen in his most recent video work, "Black September." Thirty years after the 1972 abduction and murder of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team by Palestinian terrorists, DRAEGER vividly reminds us of this absurd spectacle, almost forgotten by time and blurred facts.

Image: Reynold Reynolds et Patrick Jolley Burn, 2001, film 16mm 10min

g-module
15, rue Debelleyme Paris

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