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"Everyday People"
By focusing on “everyday people” in ordinary situations—such as lying in bed on a quiet morning or talking dirty via instant message—these five artists explore the gray area between public and private life, where people become more than their mundane, socially constructed identities.
Doug Ischar’s video brb is a perfect example of this: By contrasting footage of a monotonous roadside landscape with the transcript of an instant-message conversation rife with obscene fantasies, he points out how much more we can say through online chatting (or in our heads) than in our constrained “real” lives. Molly Landreth’s Simon and West, 9am, offers a different type of revelation when the viewer notices that the photograph’s two young men embracing in bed are pre-op and post-op female-to-male transsexuals. (There isn’t a noticeable lump in Simon’s undies; he strategically covers his breasts, while West has mastectomy scars on his chest.)
Ischar and Landreth get beneath the surface of everyday life much more successfully than the other artists. Brooke Barnett intends her acrylic paintings to highlight the taboo nature of sexual acts performed in unexpected domestic spaces, such as cunnilingus in the kitchen, but her pieces look too much like rough sketches to be effective. Also, in depicting clichés of gay adolescence—like a boy in love with his bully—Jared Buckhiester’s graphite and ink drawings reflect several artists’ tendency to recycle overused material.
And a serious lack of diversity made us raise our eyebrows. This show might be stronger if its “everyday people” represented more of their community.
