What up, insomniacs?
I was recently asked to review a show of painting, drawing and sculpture by Samuel Dunson. It was a great show at David Lipscomb University that closed at the end of January. One of the strongest shows I’ve seen yet this year, Dunson’s Coping Mechanisms is also the riskiest, most challenging collection I’ve seen this artist display.
My review:
In a 2008 review of an exhibit by artist Samuel Dunson, critic David Maddox wrote: “Dunson has set his art in motion, upsetting the terms and boundaries of his previous work… He shows himself more willing to lose control.” In 2011, the artist seems to be pushing his boundaries even further, and Dunson’s new show of sculptures, drawings and paintings at Lipscomb University’s John C. Hutcheson Gallery find Maddox’s three-year-old musings as pertinent as ever.
In the artist’s own words, Coping Mechanisms: Letting the Past Sooth my Future is “…a series of paintings, drawings and sculptures that have helped me deal with the inevitable – ‘I’m getting older.’” The poet Arthur Rimbaud said that “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will,” and Dunson’s show is a testimony to the fantastical realities that can rise from a childlike capacity for the imagination. The result is a mixture of the cute, the creepy, the brutal and the absurd.
I’m used to Dunson’s large, vividly colored, thoroughly composed narratives that incorporate pop cultural references by the pound. Reasserting the artist’s place among Nashville’s best, Coping includes a few more familiar works while simultaneously striking out for new territory, incorporating drawing and sculpture to create a show about aging that is full of vital, intense risk-taking.
The show opens dramatically with a display of stuffed animal wall sculptures. Both ominous and humorous, they’re each mounted to wooden plaques like taxidermied animal trophies. “Mange” is a mangy bear’s head holding a helpless chipmunk in its forever-frozen maw. In “Full Immersion” another bear clamps its teeth on something that looks like a totem doll in an Ewok suit. The piece resonates with predatory implications until you squeeze the little creature’s left hand. Suddenly it begins to shake its legs and make a snoring sound. The creature isn’t slain, it’s sleeping. The bear isn’t so much a murderer as it is a mother carrying the smaller beast by the scruff of its neck. The show’s initial display serves up a microcosm of the deathly delights and childish charms that make up the exhibit as a whole.
Two of the show’s best pieces re-imagine iconic imagery from the Vietnam War era, re-contextualizing and personalizing these cultural touchstones. Journalist Malcolm Browne won the Pulitzer Prize for capturing the 1963 self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thích Qu?ng ??c. Dunson’s re-composition of the original is so precise that the reference is immediately understood despite the replacement of nearly every element one remembers from the black and white image. Here, Dunson’s vivid colors are on display in a scene that finds a sock monkey sitting in the middle of a traffic intersection while another sock monkey walks past in the background. It’s as if Mike Kelley has been asked to do the production design for Rise of the Planet of the Apes II. In Browne’s photo, the monk in the road is engulfed in flame. Here, Dunson’s subject seems a martyr to beauty – his serene face barely visible in a blaze of fire-orange-and-red blossoms.
With Process of Assimilation, Dunson remixes Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams’ 1968 image “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon.” In Dunson’s version, General Loan is dressed in what seems to be a furry blue coat along with a matching gas mask – the getup makes him look like he’s wearing a DIY wooly mammoth costume. The same blue stuff explodes about the head and shoulders of the prisoner as the pistol is discharged. In Dunson’s version, the gun itself is rendered to resemble a silkscreen design of a cartoon revolver, implicating both Warhol and Lichtenstein in the atrocity. The entire painting is covered with repeating images of floating flower blossoms and the photo’s image of the prisoner’s grimacing face is presented here as the picture of serenity. While most of us won’t face a political execution, Dunson’s painting – and the exhibit as a whole – seems to say that we’re all the same in our struggle to embrace our inevitable ends with dignity and consciousness.
Stay awake!
Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!
