FOYER-LA’s current project, IS IT SAFE, explores the paradox of safety and its co-dependency with fear. Somehow ‘Security’ becomes more about the degree of personal insulation rather than about personal safety. The artists in the project: Ida Applebroog, Jonathon Hexner, Jesse Robinson, Gabriela Salazar, Connie Walsh, look at the desire for safety while simultaneously the futility in it, exposing the underbelly of uncomfortability.
Ida Applebroog describes her self-published books created between 1977-81, as ‘A Performance’. Sent through the mail to a selected art world audience, Applebroog utilizes repetitive framing devices to situate the viewer in the position of a voyeur. By participating in her books, we become the observer peering in on private interactions. The ‘underside’ of everyday life is exposed where vulnerable characters are caught within power structures. Terse, usually disquieting captions are graphically inserted without an ownership of voice or directionality leaving the viewers to 'fill in' from their own experience and become part of the work themselves. In an interview on Art21, Ida Applebroog shares, “It’s hard to say what your work is about, but for me, it’s about how power works: male over female, parents over children, governments over people, doctors over patients.”
Jonathan Hexner is fascinated with notions of security which permeate our world. He comments, “We have encrypted passwords and firewalls for everything. More people carry ‘Personal’ firearms than ever before. Security guards are ubiquitous and surveillance systems are omnipresent, constantly examining everything.” Hexner collects security envelopes and scans their intricate patterns as a source for his prints. The interiors of these spaces are lined with decorative markings to obfuscate visual access to the material content. Ironically, these designed motifs which are not meant to be looked at are used to prevent access to information.
Gabriela Salazar explores ideas of safety in her constructed support systems that bridge the space between a body and a structure. Salazar’s sculptures, skinned with plasticine, an oil-based clay that never completely hardens, offer a malleable almost ghost-like handling to the surface of the apparent aid. These pieces, seemingly formal in their implied functionality, disrupt expectations of stability and expose the precarity and fallibility within ideas of secured safety.
Connie Walsh’s video “Dance” follows the movements of a young boy investigating the material qualities of horsehair loose and bound. His inquisitive nature and imagination prompt him to perform animal imitations, as well as choreographed dance movements that evolve into a metaphor for aggression. The young boy exclaims, “These are ropes, you capture yourself.” In the end, the performer dismantles the “blue sky” as a backdrop asking the viewer to question whether behavior is innate or learned. Ida Applebroog’s books invite “the viewer to become an active participant once again, drawing attention to the never-ending crossover between fiction and reality and the lapses in communication that divide us.”
Jesse Robinson’s intimate graphite drawings on paper of still life constructions, give no clue to context or function. These renderings of different types of rope feel like bodies interacting with one another in a possible relational struggle. Robinson describes, ”They loop, circle back on themselves, caught in a moment. Anthropomorphic qualities emerge, bodies become interdependent.” Here the object of observation, a rope, pulsates between abstraction- an exploration of texture, line, tautness and representation used to create lines of demarcation, cordoned off space, and means to restrict another. Robinson reflects, “One might make the argument that the most important/consequential things are not seen. What is tied, restrained, or constrained is omitted and the only thing left is a representation of the act devoid of the objects acted upon.”
Turning to nature in its expansiveness, offers an ease in re-remembering our condition and the unpredictability of nature’s unspoken power. In An Essential Solitude: Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, Kathleen Shields interprets De Maria’s “essential solitude” as: “Such an experience suggests that who we are is not so much a matter of closely held individuality as of opening ourselves to relation and contingency, and to the possibilities for developing how we perceive and engage with the world and others.” Somehow it seems in our attempt to secure safety we have lost the sense of belonging in the natural world and in our fundamental connection with others.
