Tell Me What You Want

In memory of Gene Beery (October 13, 1937 – November 19, 2023)

Presented in tandem with a solo exhibition by Lex Brown, featuring her film, Communication (2021). 

In Zoe Barcza’s sharply illuminated painting, A Big Surprise (2023), a young woman with a twisted expression calls out via a comic strip bubble, “I GET SICK AND TIRED OF THE SAME OLD BOGUS I WANT A BIG SURPRISE!” At second glance the image seems to be projected over a closeup view of female genitalia. Alluding to historical provocations by Gustave Courbet and Roy Lichtenstein, Barcza participates in painting’s tradition of examining the elusive feminine ideal. At the same time, the work appeals for something different, something exciting. 

Tell Me What You Want brings together 17 artists who wish for a little bit more from the art system and capitalist society. They might be playing with what theorist Chantal Mouffe describes as an agonistic model of subverting the dominant hegemony by visualizing that which is repressed. But it’s more like they are seriously joking, using humor to call out and question activities in the gallery space and beyond. Working in relation to present conditions but also reacting to previous ones, they examine historic frameworks to make more room. As critic Peter Schjeldahl points out: “The tighter the space in which you can swing your arms, the more precious is your liberty to do so.” These artists, aware of the relations that make art possible, via a highly mediated path create works that challenge the status quo by announcing their dreams. 

In 1971 John Baldessari famously declared “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art.”  He instructed students at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design to scrawl the sentence repeatedly, “like punishment.” Poking fun at an educational system which prompted young artists to imitate rather than experiment, Baldessari deployed a wry wit to keep his students off-kilter. He urged them to embrace failure, or at least to not fear it. In a late print from a 2015 series entitled Engravings and Sounds, made one year before his death, an enlarged image of a detail from a 15th century engraving depicts the splayed hand of a man in mid-air, captioned by the word, “ARG.” The figure, falling, appears to have been ejected from heaven. 

Other artists in the exhibition also use text to boldly take aim at the etiquette of the art system. Gene Beery, Martine Syms and Alexis Smith write large to express how prevailing tastes and trends often keep others out, while Dan Mitchell’s posters use words and graphic imagery to expose the art world’s secrets and scandals. Amanda Ross-Ho plays with concepts of high and low art by recreating a T-shirt made by her father, an artist and a first-generation immigrant from Shanghai to Chicago, at a monumental scale. The garment features an idiosyncratic design rendered in Sharpie, as well as the words, “LESS IS NOT MORE,” parodying the dictum popularized by modernist architect Mies van der Rohe.

Some works are more demure, seeking space for the artist to experiment without being pinned down: Julia Yerger’s collaged work on paper using pieces of comic strips resists both a narrative and a punchline. Calvin Marcus’ paintings and sculptures articulate forms like blades of grass and red bricks, masterfully and devotionally. The effect is grounding, though the viewer is blocked from an easy read of the artist’s motive.  

Chadwick Rantanen, Benjamin Reiss, and Ed Ruscha address the creative process and hint at the limits of what art can aspire to. Benjamin Reiss’ diagrammatic sculpture, Metronome (mom’s) (2021), ponders why the rhythm making machine has historically taken on the shape of an obelisk, pointing upward. By using crushed eggshells and food packaging as building materials, Reiss constructs tension between the need to constantly nourish one’s body and higher hopes. Chadwick Rantanen’s Press Fit (Staircase) (2023) series pieces together laser-cut plywood models of stairways, implying circuitous routes of ascension and descension, whereas Ed Ruscha’s YES (1984), appearing in faint letters on an orange sky, evokes the slow process of coming to an affirmative decision.  

Looking outward, artists of different generations critique oppressive institutions that hold us in their thrall, preventing us from making our own choices, and formulating for us what we want. Isabelle Francis McGuire’s sculpture, Paranoia Sublime in the Wild Wild West (2023), and Alexis Smith’s framed collage relating to the Iraq War, Accidental Tourist (2003), both use children’s toys to show American citizens literally roped into what they least support. Three paintings from Ben Sakoguchi’s ongoing Orange Crate Label series reveal historic links between Christianity and capitalism in marketed visions of Heaven. 

Lastly, several artists address how we communicate with each other, and wonder how art might bring us together. Joseph Grigely’s Conversations with Ellen (2018) displays notes exchanged with artist Ellen Cantor over a number of years, in their studios or at a happy hour. Grigely, who is deaf, has been archiving his everyday conversations with friends, scrawled across pieces of paper. Grigely comments, “I met Ellen C. a couple of years ago, and one of the things that I really liked about her is her uninhibited way with words. . . . A lot of people aren’t afraid to speak their mind, but to write your mind takes a different kind of effort.” Ellen Cantor’s 1996 video, Within Heaven and Hell (1996), cuts between scenes from The Sound of Music and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and examines how a language of desire exemplified by the iconic Hollywood musical also provides the script for violence against women and war.

EJ Hill writes a message in sizzling pink neon: “Consume with reckless abandon, this unholy communion.” The work entitled Kiss was made during pandemic isolation in 2020, when casual human touch was forbidden, and when George Floyd died with his neck under the knee of a police officer. It was a fearful time, to say the least. In his ongoing investigations, Hill uses the color pink to contemplate vulnerability and to explore how bodies/subjectivities are formed and valued within different social and cultural contexts. Furthermore, Hill is interested in how we may redefine the parameters that govern our freedoms. With Kiss, Hill signals his dream: to live courageously and unapologetically in survival and love.