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The photo on the opening’s invite reminds me of the Beastie Boys’ get ups in the “Sabotage” video, three men dressed like the protagonists of some seventies prime-time drama serial. It’s camp, a type of dude drag. A lot of the works in Nudashank’s new show illustrates a pop culture savvy that’s eager to demonstrate an ability to flout media tropes. Rather than presenting four individual aesthetics, these four artists from Richmond, Virginia tag-team the gallery space to present a collective identity under the brand name Reference Gallery.
James Shaeffer and Conor Backman create a series of gag ads for a product called Ref-rence (slogan: “Defy Xcelence”) that cop the layout conventions of high-end designers of cologne, wrist watches and clothing, and carefully plant the ads into back issues of popular fashion magazines like Vogue. Another piece takes the form of a poster and riffs off the iconic album art of Nirvana’s second album Nevermind– the almighty dollar dangling at the end of a fishing line and that familiar font which in this case reads “Reference Gallery”. A third piece mimics those zine-quality 81/2 x 11 fliers that tell you when local bands are playing– the gallery info is scrawled next to a pic of a kid passed out in a pool of blood, amid broken beer bottles.
The strategy is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s tactics, the way he mimicked and satirized commercial fame even as he courted it. And Nudashank, a rigorously stylized brand-name gallery itself, is the perfect venue for such a self-conscious show.
But it gets boring schematizing work in this way, according to concepts which are straight out of art history class. Such academic work is important, because it points to our predecessors and brings their concerns into the present context. But it is refreshing and inspiring to see work that can’t be categorized so neatly, and thankfully there are some works in Reference @ Nudashank which go further and show something more genuine and quite beautiful.
Ross Iannatti’s photographs, for example, document a less controlled, more immediate confrontation with the world. They demonstrate a sensitive, fanciful perspective that locates the poetic in the most mundane scenes. James Shaeffer’s concussed still-lifes are also quite moving. Even though the techniques employed are quite apparent (he’s appropriated two pictures of flowers, one of Wolfgang Tilmans and one of Willem Van Aelst and sparsely applied the Photoshop Healing Brush), the effect is unexpected. If these bouquets were faces, say, we would be aghast at how something so familiar could be so drastically disfigured. In the case of the Van Aelst still-life, the digital intervention compounds the distance of time and space and brings into sharp relief the great loss that separates us from this cultivated and peaceful scene.
This sensitive and more earnest engagement with the subject gives us confidence in the rest of the show, because we can see that besides being clever, the artists are in touch with the human concerns in the question of representation.
Reference @ Nudashank January 14th through February 4th
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