SNYDERMAN SPINS A WEB
If a room full of his paintings at the Center for Contemporary Arts (1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338) is anything to go by, I'm betting Gerry Snyder is a drug addict. Nothing too hard, you understand-nothing that would leave him drooling in a darkened corner, arms wrapped tight around pale legs and hands shaking with too much violence to hold a brush. No, I'm thinking something more low-key and vision questish, a mild dosage of hallucinogenic amphetamine and a persistent haze of mineral spirits for an inspirational perma-buzz glazed with extra-aural light.
How else to explain the fervent, illuminated landscapes, the over-sexed and many-gendered, history-steeped cartoon effigies, the cinematic narratives in a thick-aired otherworld that mirrors, mocks and comforts our own?
Of course there are other possibilities. Snyder may be a holy man of some kind, no longer in need of external stimulants, but relying on the queer, but oh-so-clear, sight provided by the glow of a wild churning painter's lava boiling in a crucible inside his skull. There is even the possibility, I suppose, that he is a remarkable artist, not only in command of his craft, not only fluent in history, not only comfortable with contemporary culture, but able to mix, like primary pigments, each with the others and to add as necessary the tint of personal vision in exact and appropriate amounts.
Whatever the case, the world described in Snyder's collection at CCA,
Special Features
, in which he re-enacts or interprets subjects ranging from John Wayne movies and particularly brutal and vague sections of the Christian bible to obituaries and a transformative history of cross-dressing cabaret (not to mention the peculiar crossroads of wunderkind curator Robb Storr, 12 clowns and the calendar year), is more than enough to induce fits of weeping, anger, laughter and orgiastic celebration right on the public, shiny, freshly refinished gallery floor. Seriously. At one point I actually considered shoving aside any bystanders, stripping my clothes and diving forever into one of Snyder's paintings. True it would probably have ended badly for me, but the power of each work is such that it seems possible-and strangely desirable-to step inside them.
Here's why: Beginning with a landscape, always imagined, Snyder creates a luminous, pastoral paradise of lakes, hillocks and clouds-the brushwork immaculate, practiced and painful with nearly weightless beauty-and then he populates the landscape with fluffy, puppy-headed, turkey-thighed cartoons likely to have breasts and big bellies and pert tails and soft, wagging penises regardless of any gender specifics proposed by whatever narrative he is exploring. There might be angels, there might be pugs, there might be coon-skinned caps, there might be anything the artist has carefully chosen to include as subtle, provocative mechanisms for entering the story. The denizens of Snyder's paintings are pliable, goofy and emotionally ambiguous both to prevent viewer's from recoiling at some of the testier subject matter and to provide a necessary engagement; they are neither serious or complete enough to carry the issues alone and require the collaboration of an audience-an audience the artist has cleverly filled with desire and dumbfoundedness for such revelatory color, such playful disdain of convention, such heretical content and the casual blending of all of it into an approximation of dangerous majesty using only colors squeezed out of a tube.
SUCK IT, SQUEEZE IT, RUB IT
Kiki Seror uses technology to get primal about sex. With hidden cameras, fractal graphics and light boxes displaying both furtive and raunchy chat room sex talk, Seror pokes fun at our peacockish predilections (like lipstick), pulls back the tinny veneer of our subjugated sex-obsessed monkey brains and blows wide open both disturbing and gleeful, paradigm-wrecking communication dynamics found on the Internet. Much has been made of global interconnectivity-business zings along and so do grass-roots movements and fundraising drives, doctors save children's lives via electronic collaboration, authors self-publish, music and movie distribution undergoes revolution-and Seror demonstrates all these things, manifesting the continual, nodal flowering of idea and information exchange with kinetic, sculptural video projection. But she also presents us-more out of anthropological curiosity, I think, than confrontational agenda-with our limitless capacity for aggressively boinking each other silly, especially from the anonymous distance of the Internet. Seror first takes the language of hard, saliva-soaked nipples and eager, throbbing cocks and builds the letters into beautiful 3D typography, giving heated, momentary words a lasting architectural power. It's one thing to quickly type an action like pulling someone's hair to force their head toward your crotch and it's another altogether to stare at words, reverberating and back-lit like a Dunkin' Donuts sign. It's one more step to read the words next to a stranger. It's funny, It's dark, it's hard to talk about. But Seror herself will be talking about it as she discusses her show,
Ms. Survey
, at SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199) with Terri Senft, who has thought more about the merging point of feminism and technoculture than you might think possible. Sex, surveillance and cyberpunk chat gets underway at SITE at 6 pm, Tuesday, March 8. No word yet on free wireless with large-screen projection.
