Gallery Revisited - Stacy Elaine Dacheux Essay May 10, 2008

“All SOLO SHOWS ARE CANCELED FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR!” Electric font declares from Gallery Revisited’s website.

I click over to Google. More keywords to search: Environment, Revisited, Internal, Ongoing, Gallery, Leora. Forefront. A pinwheel spins around on my Mac. Loading. Click. Type. Type. Click. There are those words again—canceled, all, solo, shows.

I stand up from my laptop, which sits in the middle of the gallery floor, and step out into Gallery Revisited’s parking lot. Rest these bleary eyes. They’re filming next door. Two guys with big videos cameras on their shoulders shuffle around. Hey, guys! I give a wave.

Hello, Mac. Hello, floor. Here I am. Three days before the opening, surrounded by paintings and photographs yet to be hung. Plastic wrap and boxes strewn about.

I look over at Leora Lutz, who sits hunched behind her desk in the corner of the gallery and say, “It’s sorta cool how you mention canceling all your shows in the press release.”

Leora Lutz, blithely-spirited curator and sole proprietor of Gallery Revisited, continues the laborious process of type, type, type, typing out emails and blog postings filled with “!!!!!!, !!!!!!, !!!!!!” If the woman had to bike pedal the gallery to make it run, she would have legs of steel. She is a motor.

A tough and determined motor who has been running this particular space by herself since 2003, enduring a location change from Chinatown to Silverlake, and housing several projects under a different theme each year. An adaptable and enduring motor she is—type, type, type, punch, punch, punch. Leora makes a phone call, exits, then returns, and begins hanging the show.

Now, it’s my turn to lull, lull, lull the words out like tiny roaring lions hiding inside my little head. So, without further adieu, let’s continue with this voracious unleashing.

Miraculously Insular:

As a child, I had a strong fondness for the game of Operation by Milton Bradley. For those who don’t remember the game, allow me to explain. All the players are presented with one big plastic surgeon’s operating table with a lithographed patient, named Cavity Sam, lying helplessly on said table.

Cavity Sam’s nose is a glowing red light bulb. All over his body are a number of fleshy openings, which expose fictional or funny ailments, represented as pieces that are lodged inside his body.

Each piece is a simple shape— a wishbone, butterfly, wrench, and a small horse, among others. They are all crafted from white plastic, and each player must take his/her tweezers and remove these pieces as either a doctor or specialist would, depending on which card is drawn.

If your tweezers get too close to the wound where the object is lodged, then the patient’s nose glows with an obnoxious buzz, resulting in the loss of a turn.

My 7-year-old relationship with Cavity Sam was a strong one. This was the first time I ever fell in love with the idea of extracting things (images, objects, ideas, visions, sicknesses, silly jokes) from the body.

Such things, translatable to my adult world, are what I now call the “Miraculously Insular.” It’s a term that is relative to a personal and collective definition.

1. On a personal level, it’s indicative of human nature—whether abstract or narrative. Similar to Cavity Sam, the Miraculously Insular remains held within our biological body, as a feeling paired with flashes of story that’s wrapped in skin and submerged in water. However, the Miraculously Insular can be self-extracted or released through the act of making art. This could also be considered a wide-awake self-surgery of sorts.

2. On a collective level, the gallery itself is also Miraculously Insular. It’s a boarding home for a body of work that reflects each artist’s self-extracted Miraculously Insular—the content of which waits to be removed by either a specialist or doctor (you or me) similar to the game of Operation.

Both extractions necessitate a concentrated eye, boldness, and the ability to trust an instinctual hand.

This is how we will look at a few of the pieces in Gallery Revisited’s latest opus—Internal Environments 2008 Project Forefront and Ongoing.

I will start by holding my proverbial tweezers; and, based on my own personal Miraculously Insular, I will extract a few pieces from the gallery space. Then, it will be your turn.

The intention is not to direct you to what you should see or what it means to see, but to illuminate (emphasis/document) the simple, yet loving, relationship between two extracted personal Miraculous Insulars (visual art / writing). I want to show how our insides silently speak with one another.

What Was Previously Wrapped In Skin: *Please refer to diagram

Incision 1. Two Triptychs of Motel Windows and Doors / Kireilyn Barber

In the past, we were caught around constructed frames, noticing that privacy, with age, restricts another viewpoint. Blues and pinks of emotional moments before they happen.

Confinement throbs for fantasy. It’s an inevitable condition.

In the future, a door has the capability to swing us out of context. Into anticipation. We’ve heard of this happening. The fear is familiar. Being allowed an entryway simply because something was left ajar, yet once inside, the narrative continues to obstruct. We find ourselves, like bugs, clinging to the window again. Hoping for pure white.

Despite this, behind marked doors, we dig up a romanticism that still slides windows open, blurs views, and seeks to see something beyond the telephone wires. Looking out, after pushing or before being pushed, we are promised a clean two seconds of air.

Incision 2. Three Small Oil Pieces on Panel / Elana Kundell

Hovering slightly above, mostly in yellow, another small depiction of where light breaks into a possible neckline. An exposure of what it’s like to lean. Perhaps, previously, there was a more unfortunate moment, a certain exhalation, or puncture, which still refuses to fully restrain the paleness of it all.

The smallest piece in the middle. A place where color is forced to its breaking point. The emotion of the stroke constricts and contracts, blowing something ephemeral into its negative space. Like a heart muscle or a liver, the experience of yellow and red with an untimely intrusion of blue murkily collects, and redistributes itself outward.

Closest to the floor, a sense of urgency, against the glare. Perhaps, previously reserved for one unknowing elbow that has a habit for making space against the rainy glow of streetlights.

Incision 3. Mixed Media Piece / Paige Wery

It’s unfortunate, how extreme brightness has the ability to trigger a fermentation of sorts that bubbles up the surface. Tiny pom-poms. Glitter. Tree branches. Bits of waxy residue from the fall-out. We tried to pay our respects carefully, kneeling like children, before the atomic.

Costume jewelry without a neck. Amidst the rubble, a sad “hello.” Falling in love, and then deciding to conquer it with clenched hands, like a tiny Napoleon, we watch the branches above glisten away.

Dripping and drooping on its deathbed, the environment continues to kick its feet, indenting a rectangular crawl space for those who are lost, in the bottom right-hand corner, next to its roots.

Cacophonic Thump

While traveling outward through eyes and hands and into colorful mixed media pieces, tightly composed photographs, playfully dark dioramas, carefully constructed sculpture, clean and simple humorous illustration, condensed diagrams, and finely orchestrated abstracts on canvas, we begin to experience a cacophonic thump.

Paige Wery, Ya Ya Chou, Julie Hughes, Rob Sato, Jessica Robbins, Elana Kundell, Kireilyn Barber, Lana Shuttleworth, CJ Metzger, Ashley Goldberg, Michael C. Hsiung, and Matt Burlingame present you with the possibility of experiencing such this cacophonic thump, or an intimate explosion of dialogue, defined as when the concept of an artist’s miraculously insular merges together with the observer’s miraculously insular to create an external noise.

In a crowd of onlookers, the act of purging the horrific of once being insular is relative to a joyous rhythmic stomping, otherwise known as a celebration for discovering and sharing in certain previously zippered up worlds of what was previously submerged in water and wrapped in skin.

Cacophonic Thump:
A Voracious Unleashing of The Miraculously Insular or An Operative Introduction To What Was Previously Submerged in Water and Wrapped In Skin

Voracious Unleashing:

Miraculously Insular:

What Was Previously Wrapped In Skin: *Please refer to diagram

Cacophonic Thump

Cacophonic Thump: A Voracious Unleashing of The Miraculously Insular or An Operative Introduction To What Was Previously Submerged in Water and Wrapped In Skin

Voracious Unleashing:

Miraculously Insular:

What Was Previously Wrapped In Skin: *Please refer to diagram

Cacophonic Thump

Cacophonic Thump:
A Voracious Unleashing of The Miraculously Insular or An Operative Introduction To What Was Previously Submerged in Water and Wrapped In Skin