When my grandmother died, sorting through the stuff she had amassed in her lifetime was like an archaeological dig through alternating layers of wonder and curiosity. There were remnants of her life everywhere, often not the life of a grandmother, but simply of a woman, and helping to catalog drawers and closets and such was a strangely voyeuristic activity. There were cards and letters bound from months of pen pal correspondence with young soldiers during WWII, even a mysterious and flirty note from an H Hefner. An early affection for DH Lawrence and certain other adventuresome novelists surfaced. A remarkable array of boas and
long white leather gloves was uncovered. Original plays and fashion illustrations in my grandmother's hand passed through my grasp. But the single most extraordinary thing may have been a quasi-secret medicine cabinet, packed with decades of curious supplies and a stunning sampling of prescriptions, uniformly beyond their expiration dates; more museum case than active toiletry storage. There was even a joint prescription for Valium that had been issued to her and her husband. Imagine the doctor: "Both of you just take one of these each evening at cocktail hour and you won't have a care in the world." Of course no amount of drugs would have curbed my grandmother's horror to think that people were rooting through her dressers and pill bottles.
It's the easy recognition of both sides of the voyeur fence, to watch and to know you have been watched, that makes the photographs of Coke Wisdom O'Neal such an illicit delight. Displayed in rows at Evo Gallery (725 Canyon Road, 982-4610) each image is of a different medicine cabinet with its candid contents opened to the world. The images are actual-sized and cropped to follow the exact outline of the original cabinets. Hung at about average medicine cabinet height, it looks like a room full of private bathroom nooks staring out at Canyon Road. To see several of the images in a row is almost too much; it borders on an advertising installation, the kind of thing that might line the walls of the Berlin subway or be a toothpaste campaign in Wallpaper magazine. But being armed with the knowledge that O'Neal furtively captures these photographs when and where opportunity presents itself is what sends the work over the edge. It's every host's worst nightmare; your guest is in the bathroom taking photographs. It began as a way of taking a family portrait, with O'Neal photographing the medicine cabinets of his sister, his parents, even his own. But as the artist works occasionally as an architectural photographer, he gains entrance to quite a few homes and buildings where he stealthily documents all manner of cabinets, soon to reappear at an uncomfortably public venue, generally without the owner's knowledge or permission.
O'Neal leaves the cabinets as he finds them and allows the viewer of his photographs to draw conclusions, or gasp in shared horror. Staring at O'Neal's work, it is difficult to imagine a more terrifying and intimate psychological profile could be extracted from anything else in the average house. That profile, sadly, is almost inevitably cold as it focuses on products and pills, addressing our least favored characteristics: phobias, neuroses, insecurities and illnesses of all sorts and how we allow ourselves to be preyed on commercially to sate such perceived problems; how we store the black magic pastes, remedies and beautifiers in the heart of our homes.
It's hard to imagine loving the owner of any of the cabinets pictured. Unless, you know, it was your grandmother.
O'Neal's work is expertly accompanied by that of Sandra Valenzuela. Playing the role of straight man to O'Neal's breaking and entering-style pranksterism, Valenzuela's photographs are clean, filled with bright white light and focus on one subject at a time: Three glistening condoms, still in their coin-shaped poise, but just out of the package, spread across an antiseptic background, the frame not entirely containing them; another image is of a simple white roll of medical tape; still another is a blurry forest of Q-Tips. Each image is white on white-or close enough-and, what you might call, with a little hesitation, hypnotically hygienic. Valenzuela, a young artist working out of Mexico City's vibrant scene, amazingly captures as much clinical disorder at the juncture between the individual and the world of health and hygiene products as O'Neal; though his images address the psychological tangle at work, the malady of the mind, Valenzuela reveals the singular focus, the ethereal worship and fervent belief in the power of things to protect us and to make us perfect.
A lone work on the wall by the original pop culture distillation maverick, Ed Ruscha, sets the tone by reading in bold letters: "Safe and Effective Medication."
