Ripped from the Pages

Ripped From the Pages is one of a series of shows at CACHH's gallery 125 showcasing the work of the latest crop of individual artist grant recipients. CACHH bundles an odd lot of artists together under a loose heading, often producing cacophony, but the current installation is surprisingly clean.

Seth Mittag and Peter Precourt's All In & Drawing Dead, 2006 is a roomful of giant poker chips with a video screen incongruously lodged in one chip showing a loosely collaged story about a poker player and his disapproving girlfriend in an endless five minute loop. It's textbook example of how video and sculpture shouldn"t mix. When watching the tiny screen, you completely ignore the roomful of giant poker chips, and vice versa. Despite its small size, the video's light, sound and movement dominate the piece, reducing the elaborately scroll-sawed poker chip sculpture to an attractive but irrelevant prop. And the video isn't worth it. Edited by Larry Horn, it tells a stylized soap opera story. Shot one is a close-up of a girl's eyes, with an accusatory voiceover: "you lost again . . . you said you'd quit . . ." Subsequent shots of speeded-up poker playing, driving, and shopping at Whole Foods tell his side of the story. The video has its moments; there's a memorable bit where the male protagonist is making a cucumber sandwich, dealing out sliced cucumbers like poker chips, making a surprising metaphor between his poker and his daily life. Otherwise, the chips in the gallery connect in the most superficial way with the poker playing in the video, leaving you unsatisfied.

Keith Plocek's untitled (words writ) sticks cardboard beer coasters to the wall with magnets. Each coaster is printed with a word, and Plocek encourages viewers to arrange their own phrases using the selected vocabulary. It's not Sniglets; the words Plocek provides reek of a barroom toilet stall: PEE, BEER, SMOKE, BUSH, STINK, LOVE, WHORE. There are a lot of little connecting words like A, AND, FOR, IF, but the few verbs available make it hard to construct sentences; the best I could do was "I KNEW CRAIG's MOM's BATHROOM," but that beats the semi-literate "NO WET HERE" or the expectable "YOU STINK." The coasters are worn, making me think they have seen actual service on bar-tops, where they would be much more fun to play with. Even a clunker like "RELEASE PEE AND BEER" could be hilarious after enough longnecks.

William Betts' surveillance video paintings work two ways: from a distance they are mug shots, glimpses of anonymous faces and generic events that are given a sinister patina of crime by the drab purply-green monochrome of low-quality video. Up close they are scintillating fields of candy-colored plastic paint dots. One of the best things about the paintings is Betts" virtuoso ability to capture the odd colors of surveillance video in paint. There is a raft of readymade political statements to be read into these works, were they not so concerned with painting. The CIA is closing in; Big Brother is watching, etc. But the subjects being surveilled aren't sympathetic, pieces titled Killer and Skinhead put us on the side of righteousness, watching "bad" people caught on tape. Some well-dressed men standing in a group in Betts" Four Men are automatically transformed into a top-level conspiracy. It's a fiesta of paranoia about watching and being watched, helped along by the nervous pointillist dots.

Matthew Sontheimer's The Carrier's Memorandum, 2006 is a mud-smeared wall scrawled with semi-legible handwriting. Fragments of childhood diaries emerge in disjointed words and phrases: "momgavemebaby . . . pillows . . . lookslikea . . . cheerleadingtrophy . . .jokebook . . . collectionsoffolders . . ." Selected letters are circled in red paint, and connected along curved pathways to form words that, when decoded, read "TRY AND REMEMBER SOME DETAILS." It elicits a mild word-puzzle appeal; but suppose you were told the mud was collected from the breach point at the 17th St. Canal in New Orleans? Every remembered banal detail becomes coated with a saccharine pathos. It's sentimental schmaltz, the familiar formula of every disaster movie; contrasting the minutiae of normal life against the looming terrible event. The disaster may be real, the recollections may be real, the mud may even be real, but the emotion they conjure is a cardboard simulation, an enjoyably mild dose of grief, like a vaccination against the real thing. In B movies, that's fine: it's fiction; but prodding at other people's real-life misfortune for catharsis is tacky.

Ripped from the Pages includes two artists using text, a video, a painter, one sculpture, two wall paintings. The broad summing up that's often placed here at the end of the review would be artificial, so I'll skip it.

Images courtesy the artists.

Bill Davenport is an artist and writer living in Houston. Click here to see his homepage.