Elliott Hundley at Shane Campbell

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This exhibition of recent work by Los Angeles artist, Elliott Hundley takes its name from “Eighteen Seconds”, an avant-garde screenplay by Antonin Artaud. Written in 1925 for a silent film that was never produced, it presents the last eighteen seconds in an actor’s mind before he shoots himself in the head. He’s on the verge of both a great career and romantic triumph, -- but “he has been stricken with a bizarre malady. He has become incapable of reaching his thought; he has retained all his lucidity, but no matter what thought occurs to him, he can no longer give it external form…. ----- he is reduced to watching a procession of images, an enormous number of contradictory images without very much connection from one to the next”

At first glance, Hundley’s collages might produce the same effect. They’ve been packed with a variety of images that seem to lack much connection. Many come from selfies or photos of other scantily dressed, lithe young men. Others come from advertising, especially fashion, or comic books. There are a few photos of statuary or ceramics, both commercial and classical. A few images are mildly cute and girlish; a few others are mildly creepy and boyish. There’s only one scene of explicit violence – a cartoon superhero walloping some hapless villain. There is zero explicit sexual activity. There’s also zero religious imagery or photojournalism of current or historic events. But there are many, many disembodied human heads –most of which stare directly back at the viewer as if to ask “and who are you?”. It’s a collection that might be found on the bedroom wall of a quiet, sheltered twelve year old boy who is more concerned with his own identity than with anything else out there in the world. Possibly he will eventually identify as gay. Possibly these processions of images make some sense after all.

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As patches of color and texture, the small images also build up into overall patterns that work quite well as abstract paintings. Several employ a grid of either concentric circles or checkerboard squares or both. The underlying photos easily get lost within the dynamics of the design – especially as the surface is built up with pins, string, and whatnots up to a depth of five inches. In one piece, the panel is penetrated with the kind of black rubber collars that are used to plunge toilets. Combined with multiple images of red gaping mouths with canine fangs, that piece is intensely ominous as well as alluring. Nothing breaks the surface however in the two works on paper, and one piece is not a collage at it all. It’s a monochrome view of a museum of comparative anatomy, overlaid with a layer of long, streaking, colorful lines. It was executed with oil paint on linen, though it feels much more like a screen image manipulated in photoshop. More than anything, these pieces might be experienced as experiments in design and materials.

The chaotic but positive energy of a vibrant city feels like it’s coursing through each work – just as it did in so much work of the New York school from the 1950’s. As an innovative and thrilling designer, the artist is obviously much more skilled, experienced, and accomplished than the fictional mind in which these final eighteen seconds were occurring. But that doesn’t make these pieces feel any less hopeless and self-centered. We are still looking at a modern boy-man who, just like Artaud’s protagonist, is “incapable of participating in the lives of others, or of devoting himself to any activity”. After nearly one hundred years, this fascination with intellectual despair can no longer be considered avant-garde. It has been normal for half a century - at least in the contemporary artworld.

Women Painting Men - Riverside Arts Center

Jessica Stanfill, "Gabrielle and the Swan"

Women have been depicting men for a very long time. Recent analysis of hand prints found beside prehistoric cave paintings suggests that the majority of early artists were female. When we visit the art museum today, however, nearly all of the historic paintings on display have been attributed to men. Since the society they addressed was patriarchal, women have often been depicted as they might best serve the needs that gender -- primarily as mothers or sexual partners.

As men continue to need women to fulfill such roles, it’s not likely that these kinds of depictions will ever be abandoned. But sixty percent of art school graduates are now female, and patriarchal priorities have been waning for several generations. What kind of roles do contemporary creative women see men as playing? The demographic of this show is rather limited. All of the artists are early millennials who got MFA’s locally within the last ten years. Not only is each of them white, but so are all the men they depict. There is variety in these depictions, from fear to pity to ridicule, but nothing like admiration and respect. Men have an over inflated view of their own importance: economically, intellectually, and sexually. They need to be taken down a notch or two. It’s payback time.

Jessica Stanfill offers us the naked man as either a drunken, inflatable sex toy or as part of a bland floral arrangement. Mel Cook scrawls the voyeurish details of male frontal nudity on the back of a boy’s prim and tight white briefs. Katie Halton depicts a bunch of beefy bearded guys hanging out at a beer garden to posture their Neanderthal manliness Celeste Rapone imagines a fairy tale villain as a child’s stuffed toy whose fat pink nose and clenched white teeth are interwoven with thin, spindly arms and a blue feather boa. Karen Azarnia depicts a bald, shirtless old man wading through a field of high grass as he desperately tries to escape something that frightens him. Gwendolyn Zabicki depicts a tree trimmer who is certainly more strong, daring, and adept than any of the men shown above, but the result of his work is pathetic. He has cut every branch off the mighty elm and reduced it to an ugly, ludicrous stump.

In all of these paintings, formal quality feels no more than sufficient to deliver the intended narrative. Like viewing a political cartoon, after you get the idea, you might as well move on. That may be the legacy of a certain kind of art education.

What about recognizable portraits? What about serious depictions of men at their best as well as their worst? What about depictions of the opposite sex as actually sexy? What about narratives that are more explicit than puzzling, and more affirming than ironic? What about artists from other ethnic groups as well as outside the conceptual world of contemporary art? It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have “Women Painting Men” become an annual exhibition - but with even more variety next time. It also might not be a bad idea to gather these same skilled and sophisticated artists around a less ideological theme.