This exhibition, my first solo exhibition at Gallery Diet, focuses primarily on the arbitrary rules, systems, and structures put in place by society. I explore the various borders and cultural mores that we must opt into—either on the micro or macro level—to exist in an organized civilization. I use humor to call attention to these systems and critique them.
From a biological stand point, cleaning out your ears with a cotton swab is unnecessary and can in fact cause more problems than it solves. Despite this, we as a society still feel compelled to engage in this grooming ritual. “Q-Tips” enlarges these used swabs to examine the by-products of the human body that goes undiscussed in polite society and the desire to remove things everyone’s bodies naturally create simply because they have designated as abject.
From a biological stand point, cleaning out your ears with a cotton swab is unnecessary and can in fact cause more problems than it solves. Despite this, we as a society still feel compelled to engage in this grooming ritual. “Q-Tips” enlarges these used swabs to examine the by-products of the human body that goes undiscussed in polite society and the desire to remove things everyone’s bodies naturally create simply because they have designated as abject.
“Felix, Flowers, Flags & Poems” was performed in Chelsea, New York on the first Valentine’s Day after 9/11. My character “The Adenoid” led this improvised performance, selling authentic candy from Felix Gonzales Torres’ “Untitled (Placebo)” ($1.25), readings of love poems by Rumi ($1.00), plastic flowers, and American flags (both $.75) the entire afternoon. This piece questions how we place value, symbolic or monetary, on objects and what makes them authentic.
A decade after creating “Untitled (Chuck Close),” I recreated the same image, but this time with the intent to investigate religion, the ways in which our identity can appear to others, and what it means to be a Jew in America. I grew out my beard and traditional pais curls, and dressed in the clothes of the typical Ultra-Orthodox Jew. In depicting myself this way, I took on the visual markers of “Jewish” as a way to present my increased feelings of otherness as a Jewish man in the United States.
“Four Track Memory” is a video composed of four, synchronized video channels, featuring a performance of The Beatles seminal album “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” from memory. Each video is a single, uninterrupted take of myself performing the entire album broken down into vocal/lyrics, bass, guitar and percussion. A commentary on the fallibility of memory, each channel was recorded months apart from one another and the flaws of the performance are maintained. A Beatles fan will immediately notice that the piece is not a perfect rendition, but in fact based on memories of sounds and impressions.
As our country became more deeply involved in wars that were re-shaping the Middle East, I became aware that many of the countries we were sending our soldiers had seemingly arbitrary borders created to assert politics and domination over an indigenous people rather than helping them. This six-foot, latch-hook, geo-political globe functions like a time capsule cementing in time the borders as they appeared when the piece was finished, but the boundaries are indistinct reflecting their arbitrary nature. Materially, “Carpet World” references the decadence of Western society and our impulse to sweep the messy thing “under the rug.”
“Lobster Clock” is a fully functional clock constructed out of taxidermied lobster shells. Visually, the pieces draws influence from pop-surrealism and the kitsch memorabilia of regional gift shops. While this clock references the shapes and forms of its referent, it offers no real indication of time other than that it moves forward. The viewer can venture a guess based on preconceived expectations of how clocks function, but there are no recognizable markers that offer concrete answers to what each hand points to.
Playing upon my interest in symbols and the necessary markers to communicate their meanings, this image extrapolates the formal similarities between the concentric circles of the iris and pupil with that of the areola and nipple. To emphasize this eye connection, I shaved the surrounding hair into the iconic almond shape of a human eye. This formal resemblance combined with our natural instinct to see faces and symbols in the world results in the absurd impulse to stare into the nipples as one might eyes, and even assign them emotions.