EUTOPIA

Jeff Gibbons

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Jeff Gibbons
Auto Relativity Kinetotron
Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas [link]
January 23 – March 10, 2015

Auto Relativity Kinetotron relies on an economy of content to construct visual forms of existential crises. Three damaged plexiglass vitrines stacked to near human height, one containing a clay amorphous ball, confront an undulating projection of snowy mountaintops. A nervous tension connects the two: one never able to find stability, the other unable to fulfill expectation. Another injured vitrine protects the third component in the exhibition: a Chock Full O’ Nuts can filled with dead flies. The recycled food container becomes waste thrice-fold, a carrying vessel for the perished consumers of human fecal matter, a Manzoni stripped of ego.

~ Gregory Ruppe
images courtesy of Goss-Michael Foundation

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Jesse Morgan Barnett

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Jesse Morgan Barnett
Personal Life
Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas [link]
January 23 – March 10, 2015

Barnett adopts the role of early retiree to reflect sentimentally on subjects of personhood. Pets, living arrangements, employment, and parenthood become material for generating sculptural and pictorial hyper-presence, a process of looking backward and inward to make something seemingly lost present again. Xerox photographic depictions of childhood antics, abstracted details from greeting cards sent by relatives no longer living, and re-re-appropriated objects build a visual maze of tragicomic sensibility. Domestic content becomes an agent for introspection, where a young man simultaneously rediscovers himself through the unceasing wonderment of his toddler son and the premonition of a much older self.

~Gregory Ruppe
images courtesy of Goss Michael Foundation

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Lucia Simek

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Lucia Simek
Conditional Monuments
2014
found foam and cardboard

Miniature monuments. Carefully sorted and stacked, the foam inserts and protective layers form delicate constructions. At first playful and plastically cute the tiny constructs quickly become earnest, attempting to stand on their own as models for places we could potentially invest with a meaning. Yet, the humble origins and material identity refutes ambitious posing for an un-present future. Instead, the feeble stacks mourn themselves: objects with protective custody revoked and symmetrical cavities empty.

~Ryder

Photo credit: Casey Leone, 2014